People’s Access to Land, Stuck in Agriculture and Literacy Development: Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Greece (by Tryfonas Lemontzoglou)

This paper has been accepted for publication by The Journal of European Economic History (issue no. 3-20, December 2020)

https://www.jeeh.it

People’s Access to Land, 
Stuck in Agriculture 
and Literacy Development:

Evidence from the Late Nineteenth-Century Greece

by Tryfonas Lemontzoglou

(Postdoctoral Researcher in Quantitative Economic History, National Technical University of Athens, School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law)
trifonaslemon@gmail.com

Abstract

Many growth theorists have argued that more equal patterns of landownership as well as the overall supremacy of modern industry over traditional agriculture have been found to be strictly associated with the rise of mass public education systems in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The theoretical background lies behind the above argument based on the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis, which states that land and capital were characterized by different levels of complementarity with human skills. Thus, on the one hand, large landowning elites were often reluctant to promote and support mass public education due to the low level of complementarity between agricultural land and human capital, while, on the other hand, rising capitalists were much more favoured by a better-educated workforce, promoting major educational reforms. Within this framework the present paper attempts to provide some of the first evidence for the existence of positive links between people’s access to land and literacy levels in the late nineteenth-century Greece, using data collected from the 1861, 1870, 1879 and 1907 Greek Population Censuses. My empirical estimates largely confirm previous findings in the literature, indicating a positive and significant relationship between access to land and literacy rates. On the contrary, “stuck in agriculture” has been found to be negatively related to literacy expansion. These results remain robust even after controlling for various other factors that potentially affect literacy, such as marital status, family size, urbanization, ethnicity, religion, students’ attainment and teachers’ availability.

Introduction

For a long period of time, people’s attention towards rising regional inequality has been strongly attracted to the so-called geography hypothesis, which suggests that different climatic and geographical conditions are responsible for explaining significant variations in economic performance between countries and regions (Bloom and Sachs 1998; Diamond 1997; Machiavelli 1519; Montesquieu 1748; Mydral 1968; Sachs 2001). However, the geographical approach could not always effectively explain why some initially resource-rich areas have suffered from low growth rates over time, while others, much poorer in natural resource endowments, have enjoyed higher levels of economic development and prosperity (Acemoglu et al. 2001). Therefore a modern approach for better understanding regional disparities has emerged, highlighting the important role of different-quality institutions in generating widely divergent growth paths across economies (Acemoglu et al. 2005; Engerman and Sokoloff 1997; Hall and Jones 1999; North 2005). 

Following the institutional line of thought, a significant number of scholars have provided evidence for the existence of a negative relationship between rising inequality and economic growth (Aghion et al. 1999; Alesina and Perotti 1996; Barro 2000; Kuznets 1955; Stiglitz 1969). Additionally, many other scholars have reported significant negative associations between land asset distribution and economic development (Alesina and Rodrik 1994; Deininger and Olinto 2000; Easterly 2007; Frankema 2010; Keefer and Knack 2002; Lipton 1974). Even more recently, some researchers have further expanded the existing literature, emphasizing the negative effects of landownership concentration on human capital development (Cinnirella and Hornung 2016; Goni 2013; Ramcharan 2010; Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga 2015; Vollrath 2013). 

In general, the society’s transitional passage from agrarian to modern industrial modes of production can provide the best chance of retesting the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis (Galor and Moav 2006; Galor, Moav and Vollrath 2009). According to GMV’s approach, during that era, the powerful landowning elites were used to largely exploit the poor and landless peasants, mainly through the expansion of sharecropping relations of production. Thus, from the landlord’s point of view, greater poor people’s access to mass public education would probably result in an even greater social mobility from small villages to modern industrial cities, increasing farmers’ wage demands and lowering land exploitation rates. On the contrary, early capitalists had great incentives to promote and support mass public education, being mostly favoured by high levels of complementarity between productivity of physical capital in manufacturing activities and human capital development (Galor 2011; Galor and Moav 2006).

Within the above framework, the case of late nineteenth-century Greece remains almost totally unexplored at the empirical level, however, providing an opportunity to retest GMV’s hypothesis in a very different institutional domain. More specifically, medieval and early modern Greece had never completely experienced the Western-type of feudalism (Mouzelis 1990, 1983; Ricks and Magdalino 1998). Even the Byzantine or the Ottoman land-grant institutions were both limited to a specific period of time, revocable, and not transferable (Imber 2002; Papademetriou 2015; Papastathes 1998). Moreover, contrary to most Western European societies, the vast majority of landholdings throughout Greek territories remained strictly state-controlled, at least until the late sixteenth century (Laiou 2002; Bartusis 2012; Tucker 2010). It was only late in the seventeenth century when the decline of the Ottoman Empire eventually allowed the transformation of land-grant institutions into a system of private ownership in land, the so-called “chifliks” (Mouzelis 1978). Nevertheless, in the years following the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the “agrarian question” became an issue of major importance among the Greeks. Immediately after the Revolution, the First National Assembly of Epidaurus (1822) declared that all former Muslim lands had to be radically transformed into “national lands” under the direct control of the newly founded Greek state (Davis and Pereira 2003; Milios 2018; Mouzelis 1978; Petropoulos 1985). In this sense, major redistributive land reforms took place in Greece between 1828 and 1871, such as the Kapodistrias’s efforts for land reform (1828-1831), the King Otto’s reform (“Law for the Donation of Greek Families”, 1835) and the first large-scale redistribution of “national lands” by Koumoundouro’s government. Paradoxically these redistributive attempts did not affect the whole country efficiently. On the one hand, the Southern Greek areas were found to be associated with mass expropriation of all former Muslim lands that later became national property and redistributed among landless Greek peasants (Aroni-Tsichli 2002). On the other hand, the Treaty of Constantinople (1832) granted to Muslim individuals located in Central Greece some exceptional rights to dispose of their lands through sale (Bantekas 2015; Katsikas et al. 2012). As a result, these lands were finally purchased by wealthy Greek individuals (the so-called “Phanariote”), who became a new class of landowners in these areas (Petmezas 2003). Consequently, a highly diversified structure of landownership emerged in late nineteenth-century Greece, with small-scale family farming has been found to prevail in almost all Southern Greek areas, while large landed estates and semi-feudal relations of production remained dominant in Central Greece (Evangelinides 1980; Mouzelis 1990). At the same time, Greece’s societal modernization process has been also accompanied by important educational changes, such as the introduction of free elementary education for all Greeks (1822), the Primary and Communal Education Law (1833) and the foundation of the Pedagogical Institute of Athens (1834), leading to a significant increase in the numbers of schools and students in Greece during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The present paper attempts to provide some new empirical evidence of the existence of a positive and significant linkage between people’s access to land and literacy levels in the late nineteenth-century Greece. For this purpose, a totally new dataset has been constructed based on information obtained from the 1861, 1870, 1879 and 1907 Greek Population Censuses. This dataset includes various socio-economic and demographic indicators, such as literacy levels, students’ attainment, teachers’ availability, access to land, family size, stuck in agriculture, marital status, urbanization, sex ratio, ethnic differences and religious affiliation, covering 350 municipalities and 41 provinces throughout Greece. My empirical estimates seem consistent with earlier literature’s findings, indicating a positive and significant linkage between access to land and literacy levels. On the contrary, the supremacy of agriculture over industry (stuck in agriculture) appeared to have negative and significant effects on literacy expansion. These results remain robust even after controlling for all other factors that potentially affect literacy.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the related literature and provides the theoretical background. Section 3 offers an introduction and outline of landownership patterns in medieval and early modern Greece. Section 4 describes the data and presents some descriptive statistics. Section 5 analyzes methods and models used in this paper. Section 6 reports the empirical results. Conclusions are presented in Section 7.

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