Social change and agriculture in the West Bank 1950-1967 : Aspects of sharecropping and commercialisation.

The thesis examines agrarian change in the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, when it was under Jordanian rule following the partition of Palestine. It focusses on practices of sharecropping during a period of extensive commercialisation of agriculture, and suggests how sharecropping contributed to this process through the expansion and/or formation of enterprises oriented to specialised commodity production. The major finding that different forms of production in agriculture (simple commodity production, small and larger scale capitalist commodity production) operated through sharecropping and generally employed wage labour, shows that sharecropping in itself does not constitute a determinate form of production, nor relation of production, nor is it indicative of any single process of differentiation of agricultural producers.