In essence, this paper shows that it was this mixed labour regime that provided the real pay-offs. While slavery played a pivotal role in elite control over the commercialized production of specific cash crops, by offering a flexible seasonal labour supply, wage-labour assured the necessary elasticity to the large landed infrastructures. To this end, this study argues that as a form of organization of labour, tenancy remained quantitatively predominant, but it was the very existence of a supplementary labour force composed of slaves and wage labourers that made tenancy so resilient in the face of changes in market demand. By examining the re-emergence of commercialized agriculture from the fourth century onwards and the related penetration of the monetary economy into the rural areas, this essay seeks to demonstrate why there was a causal connection between economic expansion, wealth accumulation, and the increase of wage labourers – of landless peasants in particular. This paper deals with the economic and social history of North Africa from the fourth to the sixth centuries.
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