It can be said that the frenzy of carving up Africa appeared in advance, mainly stimulated by China, if there was no China to participate in the world competition, the living space of Europeans would not be as narrow as it is now, and they could still enjoy a long time in the industrial revolution, but after China's huge competitors squeezed into their pool, all countries felt breathless, and the competition was much more fierce than in the original history.

Under the pressure of competition, they were forced to enter black Africa ahead of schedule.

The more fierce the competition, the faster the process of survival of the fittest, the speed at which the weak are eliminated, and the speed at which the strong obtain resources will also be accelerated, which actually means that the speed of social progress has accelerated.

I don't know if it was the inflow of African gold into Europe, which stimulated the European economy, and the European economy actually began to recover and grow. The meaning of gold is not only wealth, under the gold standard, gold represents money, so gold is not only wealth itself, but also the price of wealth, and all material wealth is measured by gold.

After the gold flows into Europe, it does not only represent that Europe has obtained millions of pounds of wealth, these gold are injected into financial institutions through the economic system, and through the leverage of the financial industry, it will become several times the circulation of money, and after the circulation of currency increases, it will indirectly have a promoting effect on the economy. In the era of the gold standard, limited by the low production of gold, in fact, there was a general phenomenon of deflation in various countries, and a large amount of gold was injected to alleviate the negative impact of deflation on the economy.

It may also be due to the natural laws of the economy, the economic crisis after the Napoleonic Wars has lasted for more than four years, and the economy has always increased and decreased.

In short, since the beginning of the 21st year of the Great Zhou, the economies of all countries in the world have generally begun to grow, and the industrial revolution has generally appeared in Western European countries, and it is more ferocious than in history, because of the competition from China, so that they must have higher efficiency to be able to offset the impact of Chinese products, and large-scale machine production, the use of large factory system, is the most efficient, so this efficient organization and production mode, began to be widely popularized in Central and Western Europe.

As the economy stabilized and countries turned their attention to Africa, the trade conflict with China was diluted. A general, because of the crisis brought about by the Chinese shock, disappears invisibly, but this is only a relaxation, by no means disappearing, if China's productive forces continue to develop, and Europe stagnates, sooner or later, a similar crisis will appear.

But China's development has not only not stopped, but has begun to accelerate.

The industrial revolution that began in the cotton textile industry and then in the silk weaving industry began to spread rapidly to other fields.

Steam power in the rapid popularization, leading the popularization of steam power, is not the cotton textile industry, but the mining industry, compared to the cotton textile industry has water power can be replaced, the mining industry basically has no alternative power source, the use of manpower, animal power, after the appearance of the steam engine, it has become irreplaceable power.

China's mining industry is more flowering, the Ming and Qing dynasties have restricted the mining industry, as a result of a large number of mines are either controlled by the government, or the people secretly mine, the scale of mining is not large, the technology is not advanced, and a large number of mineral deposits are retained.

After the release of the mining license, many mines that had been discovered long ago immediately began large-scale development, and the excavation of underground mineral deposits not only gave birth to a group of mining capitalists, but also led to the progress of mining technology. The general characteristics of the mine are that most of them are located underground, and they will encounter the problem of water accumulation, and the infiltration of groundwater makes many veins with rich reserves unable to be mined, and the copper mines of the Manchu Qing Dynasty in Yunnan use manpower and animal power to pump water, and the pumping machine uses traditional orange trees and other technologies, and the power is completely incomparable with the steam pumping machine commonly used in European mines.

After the introduction of the steam engine, the benefits of various mines were greatly increased, the veins that could not be mined could be mined, and deeper deposits could be mined, and China's mines began to become deeper, the production became larger, the mining cycle became longer, and the development of the mining industry became faster.

The mining industry was followed by the cotton textile industry. At the beginning, it was promoted by the government, and the steam textile factory was the first to appear in the Nanjing cloth in the south of the Yangtze River, Zhou Lang let the arsenal specially improve the handloom of Nanjing cloth, but because the raw materials used in Nanjing cloth are mainly colored cotton, the fiber is much shorter than that of white cotton, and it is impossible to spin yarn with the large machines popularized in the United Kingdom, so it has always been manual, and the Western technical consultants hired by Zhou Lang joined hands with local Chinese craftsmen for public relations, and it took several years to transform the traditional machine, but it is still not comparable with the large British machine in terms of efficiency, it is still very small. The output is very low, but it is also five or six times higher than that of handwork, so it has quickly spread in the Nanjing cloth industry, which is in short supply.

For a long time, the arsenal established by Zhou Lang was the only factory for the production of steam engines, and the arsenals were mainly in Fujian and Guangdong, so these two provinces were the first to begin to popularize the steam engine. The use of the steam engine in the south of the Yangtze River was slightly driven by Nanjing cloth textile, and only a few years later began to appear in the printing and dyeing white cotton textile factory, and once it appeared, it was rapidly popularized.

The industrial revolution of the silk weaving industry was driven by French capital, the introduction of a large number of French machinery, and rapid localization, and a large number of French technicians transformed Chinese traditional crafts, the industrial revolution of the silk weaving industry is not purely the introduction of new technologies, but also the characteristics of transforming old technology.

The third popularization of steam power is the field of tea production, the earliest can be pushed to the British East India Company's tea factory in Wuyishan, the British in order to improve the output and ensure the quality, the use of steam power for stir-frying, drying, instead of manual stir-frying and drying, greatly reducing the waste in artificial production, and the quality is more unified, standardized production, excluding the uneven quality caused by the technical proficiency of tea workers.

But the tea industrial revolution is advancing very slowly, mainly because of the high cost, transporting coal into the Wuyi Mountains is an anti-market behavior, when the tea market is good, the factory can also reduce the cost of coal consumption because of the increase in production, in the general market, and even the growth is not as big as imagined, with expensive coal, far less cost-effective than hiring labor, plus also need to invest capital to purchase expensive steam engines and related machinery, so the British opened factories for a long time can not be promoted.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the European tea market broke out, for two consecutive years tea production out of short supply, tea farmers opened up new tea gardens, workshops began to introduce machines, at this time can be produced to sell, how much can be produced, how much profit can be made, so more production can make more money, the cost of the steam engine was depressed, so steam power began to popularize, after the popularization of steam power, the amount of coal transportation increased greatly, diluted the freight, coal is no longer an expensive consumable, but has become a cheap fuel, This is when steam power became the norm in the field of tea.

From the mining and textile industries, which completely introduced British technology, to the silk weaving industry, which began to introduce some and transform some machines, to the tea field, which completely transformed traditional Chinese machinery, traditional Chinese technology began to play an increasingly important role in the industrial revolution.

Transformation of traditional technology and industry, this is the most direct way of the industrial revolution to improve efficiency, as for the introduction of new technology, it is more accompanied by the introduction of new industries, but China has too many unique industries, and similar technologies cannot appear abroad, so the efficiency can only be improved by reforming old machines.

However, it is still a very slow process to popularize steam power in overly subdivided industries, and the first to apply steam power can only be some bulk commodity production industries, which are easier to form scale, so as to dilute the high fixed investment in adding machinery.

In fact, since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the cotton textile industry, Zhou Lang is not too worried about the future of China, in his opinion the industrial revolution is basically impossible to reverse, once this technological revolution starts, it can only move forward, because he is dozens of times or even hundreds of times more efficient than the old era, once it appears, it is impossible to turn back.

As a result, in the later industrial revolution in the field of silk weaving and tea, Zhou Lang's attention decreased, and he no longer took the initiative to advance, but let them evolve naturally.

Zhou Lang began to turn his attention to some future technologies, those innovations that can be comparable to the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and electric power technology are still too far away, Zhou Lang can't see that before the internal combustion engine and electric power technology, there is any technology that can promote a country's economic development more than the railway, so he began to care about the railway very early.

As early as in Taiwan, Zhou Lang asked the British about the steam engine, and at that time the British had never heard of using a steam engine to drive a vehicle, and they thought that Zhou Lang was talking about putting a steam engine on a carriage.

The way the steam engine was placed on the carriage was obviously the wrong way to use the steam engine, the weight of the steam engine made it unsuitable for use as a car engine, but the strong power was very suitable for a load-carrying train, and when combined with the railway, it was the right way to open it.

At that time, Zhou Lang did not have the conditions to introduce trains, so he shelved the idea for many years, and when he unified the country, he began to care about the problem of trains, and at this time found that someone in Britain had already installed a steam engine in a horse-drawn carriage.

That man's name is Richard Trevisick, a genius inventor who has invented countless new technologies in his lifetime, but unfortunately his fate is somewhat similar to Tesla's, all the invented technologies have not been promoted, and even in the invention of the train, he was overshadowed by Stephenson's fame.