Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2017
Malgré leur surprenante diversité physique, les régions et les îles de la péninsule hellénique peuvent être classées en trois grandes catégories, formant trois zones aux caractères géophysiques bien différents : celui, au climat plutôt doux, du littoral et de ses vallées; celui de l'hinterland montagnard; et celui des plaines de Thessalie, de Macédoine et de Thrace. Au premier paysage correspondent les cultures et les produits traditionnels de la Méditerranée : la vigne, le vin et le raisin sec, l'olivier et l'huile d'olive. Au deuxième, l'économie de la montagne : les activités et les produits de l'élevage. Au troisième, les productions de la plaine : les céréales, le coton, le tabac, les agrumes. Une économie rurale aux traits méditerranéens, une autre aux traits balkaniques, une troisième aux caractéristiques mixtes.
Long-term physical and demographic conditions in Greece (15th-18th c.) favoured small-scale intensive agriculture and handicaped large-scale extensive farming depending on hired labour. Large property was further impeded when the Ottoman conquest instituted Islamic land-tenure law, dispossessed the Church, eliminated the Byzantine nobility and crippled bourgeois power. By the 18th c, rural revenues obtained by occupiers of large plots of land through direct exploitation were much lower than those accrued by these same people through letting, usufruct and emphyteosis contracts; by merchants and notables through moneylending; and by the State through taxation. With the growth of commercial agriculture in the 19th c, the small producers need for credit increased in balance with their re-investing capacity; thus they continued sharing revenues with the merchants without having to share land as well. Moreover, merchants avoided direct investment in land and farming, a high risk and low yield venture compared with moneylending and trade. As only investment in new technology could overcome physical and demographic handicaps and increase productivity, the system tended to a self-reproductive unstable equilibrium. Social conditions of sharing and compromise, however, by favouring reform, counterbalanced these reproductive tendencies and prepared the system change.