Irish agrarian conditions give a very pure example of this. The English lord who owned an estate in Ireland but never visited his property, leased it to a head farmer who in turn rented it out to smaller farmers, etc., so that the poor peasant often had to lease his small piece of land from a fifth or sixth middleman. This accounted for the fact, first, that he had to pay six pounds for a field, of which sum the owner received only ten shillings. But furthermore, every rise of the farm-rent by a shilling, which the owner imposed upon the farmer with whom he negotiated directly, reached the peasant not as a rise by a shilling, but by the twelvefold amount.

XREF: Connects to the broader theory of rent extraction and intermediation in agrarian economies; amplification through intermediaries echoes ideas about how layers of bureaucracy or brokerage compound costs.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 6065