ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the range of military operations within the empire and how it was managed in different places and at different times, with or without indigenous peasantry. It looks to the history of some anti-colonial movements – and imperial gambits too – which involve, in one way or another, that category known here as 'the peasant'. G. A. Cohen maintains that the 'imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition'. So in considering China or India or Ireland and their military-peasantry complexes, we should be very careful in our usage of the term 'peasant'. In the long history of Rome, the army moved from a citizen militia drawn from property-owning small farmers and came to depend increasingly on recruitment among both the rural peasantry and low-status city dwellers.
