When the Spanish arrived and traveled through the Inca Empire Tawantinsuyu, they marveled at the infrastructure that the Inca had established over their roughly hundred years of expansion. Garcilaso went so far as to make the utopian claim that nobody went hungry in the Inca Empire. This is more than a little naive, as Garcilaso is wont to do, having only lived in Peru during his childhood and writing his fond memoirs in old age in Spain.

This is not to say that Inca bureaucracy didn't have its ducks in a row. The Qhapaq Ñan (Royal Road) linked together Cuzco, the capital, with all corners of the empire. Along this road system storehouses and waypoints for message-runners were placed, numbering in the hundreds over the highway's many miles; in addition entire estates were devoted to larger storing needs, with hundreds or even a thousand-plus storerooms present. These storehouses were supplied by local communities who filled these coffers as tribute to the Inca. Stocked with extra food, military uniforms, and occasional contingents of soldiers, these could be opened in times of famine, though they were more often utilized by troops on the move or laborers being conscripted in far-flung regions of the empire.

However, this somewhat glosses over the fact that the Inca were motivated to control lands and goods for their own ends. Vast tracts of land in favorable portions of the empire were used to grow coca and corn exclusively for Inca nobility, or feeding the military. Running these farms meant extracting extra labor from workers who had their own community crops to grow in addition to tending lands devoted to the state and Sun. In severe cases making these farms productive required the Inca to relocate entire communities to unfamiliar parts of the Andes - forming loyal colonies with no other motive or inclination than working for the Inca, their military, and their religious institutions. So while these were incredibly lucrative ventures for the Inca, they were certainly not without their own social strife incurred as the Inca transformed the Andes into their vision.