Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Das Kolonat

Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen’s report on share-tenancy in Görz and Gradisca, Istria, Dalmatia, and Tirol derives from a journey commissioned by the imperial-royal Ministry of Agriculture in spring 1908; this edition’s publication year remains undocumented. Its argument begins by dismantling the apparent unity of its subject:

Es kann heute als feststehend betrachtet werden, daß das Wort Kolonat für eine ganze Reihe verschiedenartigster Pachtformen verwendet wird, die mehrfach nichts anderes gemein haben, als daß es sich eben immer um einen Pacht handelt, bei dem der Pachtschilling ganz oder zum Teil in einer Quote des Naturalertrages geleistet wird.

English translation: It can now be regarded as established that the word Kolonat is used for a whole range of highly diverse forms of tenancy, which often have nothing in common except that they always involve a tenancy in which the rent is paid wholly or partly as a share of the yield in kind.

A shared mode of payment does not establish a uniform legal institution or social condition. Schullern therefore organizes ten territorial chapters around local contracts, crops, property relations, and bargaining power. Separate treatments of Italian- and Slovene-speaking Görz and Gradisca precede Istria, northern Dalmatia’s coast and interior, Ragusa, Cattaro, the southern and northern islands, and Italian Tirol. Interviews and inspected agreements underpin the account; administrative and municipal reports supplement places he could not visit. The extensive documentary appendix supplies contracts, official responses, and a fifty-five-question survey, making the inquiry’s comparative criteria explicit.

His governing explanation privileges economic circumstances over derivation from Roman, Venetian, Ottoman, or Slavic institutions. Agricultural practices help determine contractual duration and obligations:

Neue Produktionsbedingungen fordern neue Produktionsformen.

English translation: New conditions of production demand new forms of production.

Phylloxera makes this proposition concrete: the destruction of vines can terminate agreements tied to their productive lifetime, compelling renegotiation. Emigration likewise works in contradictory directions, reducing available labour while supplying remittances for debt repayment and land purchase. Disease, transport, credit, and alternative employment consequently belong inside the analysis of tenancy, rather than outside it.

The sharpest indictment concerns Italian-speaking Görz and Gradisca. In Dolegna and parts of the coastal plain, insecure annual agreements, uncompensated improvements, compulsory labour, and opaque accounts combine to impoverish tenants and discourage cultivation. Schullern counters accusations of peasant indolence by tracing discouragement to contractual conditions. His comparison with better-managed neighbouring estates also prevents nationality or regional location from becoming a sufficient explanation. He proposes longer security, compensation for improvements, abolition of unpaid compulsory labour, limits on paid service obligations, written contracts held by both parties, and annual accounting.

Dalmatia presents a different problem. Tenants commonly possess houses or additional land, while their contractual rights often endure as long as the vines or olive trees. Improvements made through reclamation become inheritable, saleable, and sometimes registered interests distinct from ownership of the soil. Yet these protections can produce fragmentation and disputed claims without removing landlords’ powers of dismissal. Older agreements also obstruct agricultural diversification when owners prohibit fodder or fruit crops from which the contract grants them no share.

Ragusa illustrates the erosion of historically distinctive arrangements toward wider Dalmatian practices; Cattaro includes instances of newly emerging tenancy. Island comparisons reveal divergent paths toward ownership, continued share-tenancy, and dependence on credit. The appended local reports preserve disagreements about whether independent cultivators farm better, qualifying any simple equation between ownership and productivity.

Istria and Italian Tirol furnish comparatively favourable cases, where markets, labour scarcity, cost-sharing, and durable customary relations moderate dependence. Schullern recommends adjustments rather than wholesale reconstruction there. For Dalmatia, he favours clearer rights and facilitated voluntary purchase, warning that compulsory abolition could recreate tenancy on worse terms. His conclusion restates the methodological and political consequence of the comparison:

Aus all dem Gesagten dürfte sich zur Evidenz ergeben, daß das Kolonat in ganz verschiedenen Formen auftritt, verschiedene Quellen hat, verschiedene Wirkungen zeitigt und daher auch verschieden behandelt werden muß.

English translation: From all that has been said, it should be evident that the Kolonat occurs in quite different forms, has different sources, produces different effects, and must therefore also be treated differently.

The report’s lasting relevance lies in its insistence that agrarian reform address actual distributions of risk, investment, authority, and security—not merely replace one contractual label with another.