Sharecropping  Sharecropping is when a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. Legal contract systems such as the Italian "mezzadria", the French "métayage", the Spanish "mediero", the Slavic "połowcy","издoльщина" or the Islamic system of "muqasat", occur widely. Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the tenant. Everyone encourages the cropper to remain on the land, solving the harvest rush problem. At the same time, since the cropper pays in shares of his harvest, owners and croppers share the risks of harvests being large or small and of prices being high or low. Because tenants benefit from larger harvests, they have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than in a slave plantation system. However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms no longer benefit from economies of scale. On the whole, sharecropping was not as economically efficient as the gang agriculture of slave plantations. In the U.S., "tenant" farmers owned their own mules and equipment, and "sharecroppers" did not, and thus sharecroppers were poorer and of lower status. Sharecropping occurred extensively in Scotland, Ireland and colonial Africa, and came into wide use in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The South had been devastated by war – planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves could provide labor but had no money or land – they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. A solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers who previously had done little cotton farming needed cash as well and became sharecroppers. Jeffery Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterized by political conservatism and long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were.