Section 552 Influence Outside Europe (2)
The 150th vote is more.
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With the popularization of steel, some heavy-duty railways and large steel bridges began to use steel. The greatest value is still in the military, and the army finally eliminated the cast iron cannons that had been used for more than half a century, and began to popularize steel cannons. The current barrel is no longer cast, but drilled directly into a whole steel rod. At the same time, new rifles also began to use steel, and iron rods were drilled into barrels with special drilling machines.
The military began to fully steel, and the civilian use also began to popularize, so that the production of steel surged. Although mining has always been a less popular job in Australia due to the shortage of labor, the cost of iron ore mining in Australia is extremely high, and the price of iron ore at the pit mouth here is more than ten times that of China. But it is still welcome, because the new smelting method has reduced the production cost of steel by a factor of ten, and the steel industry can afford a sharp increase in the price of raw materials, because the cost of raw materials is only one part of the production cost. In the case that other labor costs and equipment costs remain unchanged, in fact, the final steel cost has risen by less than five times. This allows the new mill to sell at half the market price and make a profit.
Australian miners have enjoyed the greatest share of the benefits of the new technology, allowing Australia's wages to quickly surpass North America and become the highest average wage in the world. High wages force capitalists to adopt new technologies in large numbers, resulting in a substantial increase in the productivity of a worker. Many of the world's newest mining machines and equipment have been introduced to Australia, and they themselves are rapidly improving and inventing new technologies.
Mining brought about Australia's industrial revolution, while high wages attracted a large number of free immigrants. Australia's population is starting to grow faster than the Americas.
With Australia as the center, China firmly controls valuable lands in the South Pacific, including New Zealand. However, the surrounding islands are really not able to rule, and the islands with relatively strong indigenous tribes in the local area will sign a protection agreement with them and become a protectorate of China. These islands, even if they are not under control, do not allow Western powers to gain a foothold and allow them to have bases in the Pacific. Those lands that have no people, but have development value, attract investment and development, and lease them to commercial companies for development. Some islands either have guano, some islands or mineral deposits, and some have some economic value, and even the island itself is value, and those companies that lease the islands control a place outside the law, forming a corporate territory.
In recent years, some scandals have been exposed on some islands, such as colluding with Australian companies to register inhabited islands as uninhabited islands, and then fraudulently obtaining development rights. Some colluded with the gangsters, did some illegal detention, and deceived people to come here to work as slave laborers. Some used black slaves, while others captured some natives of the South Seas. All kinds of unseemly things can occur in these places outside the law. As more and more leaks were made, they began to cause public outrage, and at first the government instructed Australian companies to strictly manage them. Later, the spearhead was pointed at the overseas giant Australian company, and the call for the Australian company's territory to be brought under the jurisdiction of the government became louder and louder.
The governor of the European company, who has been circulating in the Zhou official family all these years, has passed to the grandson of the old Zhou official. The Zhou family is deeply entrenched in the company, and the company's profits are becoming more and more considerable, so they are naturally unwilling to lose these territories and have carried out a lot of public relations work.
African companies have a better reputation than Australian companies. The company has been operating in Africa for 50 years, and on the one hand, it has received the support of the government to help the government continue to manage the exile affairs, and has sent more than 5 million exiled prisoners to Africa, an average of 100,000 per year. Of these, four million went to the South African Empire, and one million to the Congo and Niger River basins, which were later incorporated into the company's territory. But the early days of the African company were in the hands of Xie Qinggao, who was not a profit-heavy man, and most of the officials he promoted were also of this type, who were keen to explore rather than profit.
Over the years, African companies have explored Africa's rivers and know more about Africa than anyone else in the world. And their means of running Africa have always been commercial management, plus agricultural development. He was more generous to the local natives, built schools and clinics in Africa, established countless cities, and taught many very primitive indigenous tribes to farm and produce, and this kind of civilization export was regarded as a benevolent government to educate the barbarians.
There is another reason for the good reputation, that is, there is a contrast, compared to the Australian emperor is far away, the Australian company is a monopoly, in addition to the African company in Africa, many European companies are also developing, the British, the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese four major forces operate here, the British abolished the slave trade, but the British government adopted a policy of oppression, so that they are not willing to invest more in improving the lives of the natives, let alone interested in decades of indoctrination of the aborigines, they support the indigenous leaders, as their puppets, help them manage the indigenous population, monopolize the indigenous commodity trade, and seek huge profits; The French are not doing well, France is a small peasant country, they have established 2.5 million agricultural centers in Africa over the years, in fact, they are colonies, France has immigrated more than 5 million people, built millions of farms, these farms are smaller than the farms in the United States, but larger than the farms in the country. The French value indigenous land, so there is a large number of evictions of indigenous tribes and land grabbing. Spain and Portugal were even secretly smuggling black slaves, sending them to the Caribbean and then smuggling them into the United States.
The development of Europeans in Africa is generally not good, even better than that of Australian companies. By contrast, the Europeans themselves are praising the actions of African companies, not to mention China.
The American Company in South America is engaged in large-scale farm operations, with no great evil and no great good, just like a typical colonial development company.
With the expansion of the three major overseas companies in addition to European companies, China has established absolute influence on the west coast of the Americas outside Europe; In the Pacific region, it is in a dominant position, with Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific islands such as Borneo and New Guinea under direct jurisdiction, and island countries such as Hawaii being protectorates of China; In Africa, the Kingdom of South Africa has developed rapidly in culture under the rule of Huashana, a literati king, in recent years, but its military has continued to decline, its expansion is weak, and it even relies on the support of African companies to avoid being subverted by a large number of mercenaries in the border areas; Central Africa is the territory directly under the jurisdiction of the company, and a large area of tropical plantation bases has been established on both sides of the equator, allowing Africans to leap from the primitive era and the era of slavery to the era of capital and commerce; The influence of European companies in Egypt is enormous.
Throughout the world, outside of Europe, only the eastern part of the Americas, India and the South Seas belong to the contested areas of China and European power.
In the eastern part of the Americas, there is the United States, an independent European cultural country, Canada, a British North American colony, and Quebec, ruled by France. In the Caribbean Sea of Central America, it was basically a Spanish colony, and Britain and the United States jointly supported Spain to maintain its rule here; South America, also mainly Spanish colonies, in this history, except for Brazil, the independence movement in South America completely failed, after being suppressed by Spain, the Spanish government and Carlos opposition forces carved up the Spanish American colonies, the competition between these two forces, can be seen as the shadow of the competition between China and Britain and the United States in the Americas.
The Indian region, bounded by the Ganges River, north and east of the Ganges, and the Indus River basin belonged to the African company, basically forming the area between Pakistan, eastern Bengal and north of the Ganges and the Himalayas under Chinese control. The African corporate forces formed a siege of British India.
Since African companies are not profit-oriented, what they do in India is more of an export of civilization. It was mainly the grafting of political culture, where a centralized administrative system was established, and officials were selected by the imperial examination, and the vast majority of officials, except for the governor, were selected from among the Indians.
The vast majority of India's wealth, especially agricultural wealth, falls into the pockets of Indians. Moreover, the company gradually began to carry out the policy of suppressing Haoqiang, so that the wealth was more evenly distributed to the people at the bottom, and when the company was strong, it was difficult for Haoqiang to resist, and gradually formed a Chinese-style small-scale peasant economy. The smallholder economy is inefficient, but relatively average, which makes it easier for the majority of people at the bottom to survive, and the result is a continuous increase in population. As a result of effective management, the population of British India was circumvented by the high incidence of plagues and famines, while the population of British India slowly increased from 180 million to 200 million, the population of the Indus Valley increased from 40 million to 60 million, the population of East Bengal also increased to more than 25 million, and the North Indian Plains had more than 20 million people, and the total population exceeded 100 million.
In the area under its rule, the African Company has built countless irrigation canals, large and small, and added hundreds of millions of acres of fertile land, with a total cultivated area of more than one billion mu. With India's water conservancy conditions, it is not a problem to feed 100 million people, but when the population reaches the level of hundreds of millions, the gap between the rich and the poor will inevitably appear, and a large number of social problems will begin to erupt. It was certainly much better than British India, and African companies did not adopt restrictive policies that restricted India's industrial development. And they manage business in India, and a large number of Chinese companies have poured in, bringing technology, capital, and management with them. Based on the abundant production of farm products, a large number of competitive industries such as rice milling, flour industry, spinning, and paper making have been formed here. Although it was only a primary industry, it was not a stage of social development compared to its immediate neighbor, British India.