Agriculture and empire

AbstractEmpires relied on agriculture for foods, taxation, soldiers, and laborers, but most empires also aided farmers during crises. Earlier contiguous empires such as China and Russia were based on pre‐existing peasant societies and often employed serfdom. Later overseas empires such as Spanish America and British and French “new imperialism” employed early versions of globalization through forced migrations to supply slaves for plantations, taxation to encourage market production, and European settlers who expropriated native peoples. Struggles between large landlords and small peasant farmers were basic themes in all empires, with extremely varied results. China's Song dynasty set a precedent of government aid to peasants, but later reforms, while sometimes successful, often failed catastrophically, such as Communist China's people's communes or the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme in the late British Empire.