In Chapter XII I examined the withdrawal from the countryside which has occurred during this century in both continents, stressing its association with the ending of farm-slavery in Hausaland and with the legal abolition of the hereditary estate-holders (jodidars) in Karnataka. In this brief chapter I discuss the inevitability of the dissolution of the large estates.

HAUSALAND

In pre-colonial Hausaland all the aristocratic and absentee owners of large estates, which were often holdings which were widely dispersed, were almost wholly dependent on the labour of their male and female slaves, which was supervised by slave foremen. Ordinary private slave owners, who were much more numerous, would usually have had their resident sons working alongside their slaves. Given that few free women worked on the land at that time, it is likely that most private farmers with holdings above, say, 50 acres would have owned farm slaves, for systems of farmlabour employment were lacking and communal labour was no more than a stop-gap for private farmers.

The large estate owners (I refer to the aristocratic and absentee owners as such) might have survived the collapse of farm-slavery had the system of daily-paid farm-labouring, which replaced it, been properly adaptable to their purposes – as it was not. As we know, this system has many inherent defects, which essentially reflect the spasmodic nature of farming activity during the farming season; two, at least, of these defects proved fatal to the estate owners, namely the constant effort of recruiting new workers at short notice and the need to supervise all the labourers' work.