Chapter 493: The Turning Wheel of History

When it comes to money, there has never been any warmth, many landless peasants have signed documents with the landlord, when they get wages for farming, they are still very happy in their hearts, according to their calculations, the price of grain at this time has plummeted, and the rent has slowly changed from paying grain to paying money, and it is becoming more and more uneconomical for farmers who rent land and grow grain. Moreover, many landlords also generously let these people move to live in the manor.

But after moving in, everything is different, the salary is not not for you, but you only work five or six hours a day, so how to do it, often have to work hard for about seven or eight hours, and the salary, at that time it was not said that it was paid monthly or every year.

As soon as I saw that it was different from the previous promise, the hired cotton farmers all wanted to leave, anyway, there are many places where you can find work now, and it is not bad to contribute to your field.

It's not so easy to go, the pre-signed paperwork is put there, and if you want to leave like this, you have to eat a lawsuit, well, since you can't go, many cotton farmers are thinking of running, wanting to run, where there are large cotton fields The landlords and squires who survive in each other's land annexation roles. There is no Ding Zhuang thug in that family, who does not collude with the government, and even his own family is in it.

If the merchants are still not deeply related to the officials, the landlords and squires are the supporters of the officials, the so-called rural people, their sons and nephews, or their families are all former officials or candidates for the official ranks. The demands of the landlords and gentry will always be met by the government, especially the landlord class, which has become huge.

The three northern provinces, in the famine and several times of chaos has caused a lot of people to be ruined, Huazhou and the Jingshi merchant group of the conscious immigrants, and a large number of vacant land, many landlords who survived the disaster year, after a few years of recuperation, the land they control is already much larger than before, the tide is rising, and their power has also become greater.

In the past, when Jiang Feng first arrived in Dengzhou, the Dong family who colluded with the Japanese invaders occupied half of the land of the prefecture, which was already staggering, and now such a phenomenon is not uncommon in Beizhili, Henan, and Shandong. "The local clan power has also swelled more and more with the expansion of the family's land, and relying on this strength to deal with the lonely farmers, the farmers can hardly form any resistance.

Beginning in the Sui and Tang dynasties, the servants and hired workers at home who were like slaves in the Northern and Southern Dynasties had basic personal rights, and they could not be killed at will like livestock.

But all this seems to have suddenly returned to the old eras, those times of chaos, those barbarian captives and slaves, and killed and disposed of at will.

At the beginning, I still pretended to sign some paperwork or something, so I tricked you in, and later, I didn't even pay attention to the things on this face, and I directly arranged for my subordinates to coerce in the past, and this thing also has a nice eye, called "invite people to be guests", although it sounds like inviting you into the urn is not much to kill, more than a dozen people with knives, guns and sticks come to invite you, even if you don't want to go.

Pressing the arm to sign the paperwork, pressing a handprint or something is commonplace, and the unlucky are not only those farmers, small and medium-sized landlords also have the same experience, just imagine, more than 100 people with knives, guns and weapons of fierce people, to your house, politely ask you whether the field is for sale.

There was that hesitation, and some people pretended to talk about so-and-so nearby, because they didn't promise to sell the land, and one night, someone set fire to the whole family, and I don't know who did it, it's all good, it's not as good as their own lives.

The words have already reached such a point that if you don't sell it, you can imagine what is waiting for you, and you can't sell it politely.

The ruffians who used to be looked down upon in the countryside suddenly found themselves becoming popular, and the wealthy families who had scorned them, and even did not want to sneer, began to take these people into their homes, and these people were idle and planted cotton and farmland, and it was a joke to them, but they were still very skillful in such things as coercing good people, killing people and setting fires.

Because Huazhou's control over private salt was relaxed, the green forest Xiangma in Beizhili and Shandong was gradually decaying, who knows, and then the sudden start of the annexation of fields, the trend of coercing good people to be slaves, can be regarded as re-finding their role, this organizational form of the Shandong Salt Association that day, gave many people too much inspiration, including the Thirteen Chamber of Commerce in Jiangnan, these landlords who annexed land also learned this.

On the one hand, it is mutual traffic news, contact with each other, on the other hand, it is collusion with force, coercion and war, some big landlords are powerful and powerful, and they can naturally hand over the government, their force is the officers and soldiers and the government, as well as the protection of the government, of course, this is the best, and there are some inferior ones, their own family has a big business, and they have raised a lot of families to protect the home, and they are rampant in the township, and the worst is those who collude with the green forest cottage as a disaster, and the previous disaster is just bullying men and women, and robbing property, At present, the evil is everywhere by annexing land to each other by force, and coercing peasant households to work in the farms.

What's more, the green forest cottage and the sound of the horse sober-minded, but also see that the profit of this cotton is amazing, this is not at all caused by natural disasters and man-made disasters caused by the rise in cotton prices, but the real demand, Jiangnan Jiangbei every year for the cotton raw material demand is extremely large, the extreme prosperity of sea trade, as a necessity of life of cotton cloth, domestic and overseas is in short supply.

At this time, the sudden expansion of production, the demand for raw materials is also extremely expanded, as for the market, the representative of the shop who came to buy cotton said that in the past, when there was no such equipment, the cloth of the Ming Dynasty was sold cheaper in Tianzhu than their local cloth.

Now with these things, the price of cotton cloth is cheaper, it is not a big sale, it is said that Tianzhu is not much smaller than our big country! Also, in Linjia Island, so many years, for the first time, there are Western ships to buy half a boat of cotton cloth to transport away, Western ships, it is said that they come to Daming on the water may have to go for a year or two years, such a high freight, originally shipped silk and porcelain some high-value fine items back to China to sell, since it is to ship cotton cloth, it shows that the low price of cotton cloth is already able to allow them to catch the cost of freight, but also to make money.

It is said that Westerners are all rich, what a big market this is, of course, these shops buy cloth and cotton shopkeepers or guys, are also half-understood roles, whether it is Spanish or Portuguese merchant ships, although they began to buy cotton cloth in Daming, but not brought back to their home country to sell, Portugal's colony in Goa, can be imported to the interior of India, Spanish ships are also in various ports along the way and their colonies to buy and sell.

All of this shows that the sales of cotton cloth will only become more and more extensive, and the sales volume will become larger and larger, and the cotton in the field will not worry about the market, as long as it is not a monkey in the forest, people have to wear clothes, and the trade of cotton cloth and cotton will continue for a long time.

There are not many places in the world that can grow cotton, that is, several provinces around Beizhili, whether it is outside the customs and Nanyang, are not suitable for planting, the more cotton cloth is sold, the greater the demand for cotton, but the field is such a large area, the price of cotton will only get higher and higher.

In other words, as long as there is a cotton field, it is equivalent to having a money jar, and there must be a steady stream of money, which is very simple, and everyone understands it.

Many of those green forest cottages and ringing horses have taken out the belongings that have been looted for many years, and partnered with the landlords and squires who need force under the mountain to annex the land and plunder the population. Especially those who have lost the financial support of the salt merchants.

The people in the north were fierce, and natural and man-made disasters were even more rampant with banditry, but after the wind of cotton planting flourished, suddenly the local government was quiet, and the government and the guard office were all confused, thinking that the current situation did not look like a sign of peace anyway, why is the local law and order good?

The reason is that the so-called long-term workers, hired laborers and semi-yeoman farmers have slowly become serfs and have lost their personal freedom, but the requirements for manpower in cotton fields and ginning are far greater than those in grain fields, and manpower is still insufficient, not to mention that the already tight manpower has to compete with the workshops and shops in the city.

The above things didn't happen in a year, but after the Lu family got the machine, the process started to run inexorably.

Slowly, some people began to sell foreign slaves in the three northern provinces......