ABSTRACT
Peasants all over the world made their living, worked, adapted or resisted, as did serfs and slaves. Opposition ranged from the use of customary and traditional practices to mitigate or undermine exploitation to outright rebellion and flight. This chapter discusses three different spatial dimensions of this process and their impact on frontier making and peasant regimes: the expansion of the imperial frontiers in agrarian, mostly land-based empires; the intensification of internal peasant frontiers in Europe and the proliferation of new frontiers in the new transoceanic empires. Frontier settlement completely changed nature and the environment. In some parts of Asia, during the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries CE, peasants fell under increasing unfree rulings. In most of Eastern Europe, peasants fell under forms of subjection similar to the former western serfdom but enforced and regulated by central governments. The building of transoceanic colonial economies involved the dissolution and incorporation of pre-colonial peasant regimes.
