noun
definition
A great landed estate with absentee ownership and labor often in a state of partial servitude.
Examples of latifundia in a Sentence
The growth of the latifundia made the slaves more and more numerous and formidable.
The immense extension of the rural estates (latifundia) made it impossible for masters to know their slaves, even if they were disposed to take trouble for the purpose.
Nepotism, however, still left its scars upon the body politic, shown in the progressive decay of agriculture in the Campagna, causing Rome to starve in the midst of fertile but untilled nepotistic latifundia.
What had previously, it seems, been a well-peopled region, with peasant proprietors, kept healthy by careful drainage, became in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. a district consisting in large measure of huge estates (latifundia) owned by the Roman aristocracy, cultivated by gangs tion, of slaves.
It is impossible to give more than approximately accurate statistics of the resultant depopulation of Portugal; but it seems probable that the inhabitants of the kingdom decreased from about 1,800,000 or 2,000,000 in 1500 to The Slave thus discredited; the peasants sold their farms and p emigrated or flocked to the towns; and small holdings were merged into vast estates, unscientifically cultivated by slaves and comparable with the latifundia which caused so many agrarian evils during the last two centuries of the Roman republic. The decadence of agriculture partly explains the prevalence of famine at a time when Portuguese maritime commerce was most prosperous.