Zhou Lang is in charge of the Northern Expedition, which is the most important work at present, and other work that can be stopped has been stopped, such as the improvement of some systems, and the transfer of those that can be transferred, such as the commercial tax was originally not owned by the civil government, and now Wang Fuqian is also in charge.

But there are still some problems, which can neither be stopped nor handed over, and will be sent to Beijing to be handled by Zhou Lang.

For example, dealing with Henry Pitt, who came to him for help.

As the chairman of the management committee of the China (East India) Company, Henry Pitt basically decided the direction of the company's development as long as he won the support of the other company, because there were only three members of the committee, one was the representative sent by Zhou Lang, one was Henry Pitt himself, and the other was the representative of the East India Company.

And Henry Pitt's work during this period of time did not affect Zhou Lang's interests, or with the increase of Zhou Lang's own strength, the commercial company he set up with his own hands did not have such a great impact on him. Therefore, the representatives sent by Zhou Lang basically supported Henry Pitt, because he found that Henry Pitt slowly began to fight for power with the representatives of the British East India Company.

Zhou Lang knew what the British East India Company was doing in India, and on the one hand, it was to cooperate with the Chinese East India Company, and on the other hand, it was to squeeze out, which was normal, and everyone wanted to cooperate to be more beneficial to themselves. Zhou Lang has not done anything to squeeze out the British East India Company, and he has played some off-the-board tricks, which is not worth making a fuss about. He now supported American and British retail merchants through Lian Li Xing, allowing these independent merchants to compete with the East India Company in areas such as tea. So it was all too normal for the British East India Company to crowd out Chinese companies in India's cotton trade.

But Henry Pitt didn't accept it. For Zhou Lang, the formation of a Chinese company was just a tool in the early days of his business, and now Zhou Lang has moved to a higher stage, and the company has become dispensable; For the British East India Company, the Chinese company was just a target for them to expand their trade with China. But for Henry Pitt, Chinese companies are almost all of his career, the most glamorous sign he can put up with to support the façade.

So in the troika of the current power structure of Chinese companies, Henry Pitt has become the one who cares the most.

After listening to Henry Pitt's narration, Zhou Lang understood some of the situation. Henry Pitt opened up a market in western India, in the Indus Valley, where he hoped to get a supply of cotton. It took him more than a year to gain the right to open a trading house in Karachi, a port near the mouth of the Indus River, to conduct trade.

Things went well, and the province of Sind, where Karachi is located, is located in the lower reaches of the Indus River, where agriculture is relatively developed, and there are excellent conditions for growing cotton, which is the ideal trade partner that Henry Pitt dreamed of.

However, the political situation here is very complicated, or in other words, the flow of people in India has been unfavorable in recent years, and the political situation in India as a whole is very complicated. In 1707, with the frenzied expansion of Aurangzeb, the powerful monarch of the Mughal dynasty of India, the territory of the Mughal dynasty reached its historical peak, ruling almost all of India except for a small territory the size of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in southern India, and more than ninety percent of India's territory was unified, which has never happened in the entire history of India. The Mughal dynasty also reached the peak of glory with this.

Aurangzeb, the monarch, has a somewhat similar temperament to Qianlong, and his shortcomings are even worse. He was so happy that during his reign he constantly waged wars of unification, and the government took over ninety percent of India's territory. Like Qianlong, he also likes pleasure, but it is even more excessive, with the army all the year round with thousands of maidservants, dancers, musicians to serve him, the military camp he went out to fight is a city of activities, and the materials consumed are incalculable. In order to carry out the war, he greatly increased the tax rate, and half of the output of the peasants had to be handed over to the government, resulting in the livelihood of the people at the bottom; And he is also very spiritually clean, or has a sense of honor, or a sense of mission, etc., he is a Muslim monarch, he hates infidels, so he greatly increases the taxes of the pagan people, although there are many people who convert to Islam, but the contradictions that erupt because of religious issues are very serious, after all, India is still a predominantly Hindu country.

An emperor like Aurangzeb could still suppress contradictions while he lived, but as soon as he died, all problems erupted. Hinduism, Sikhism and other religious forces began to rebel and established independent regimes. Aurangzeb had exhausted his national power, and with his military conquests, he had divided large amounts of land among his generals, who were so distracted that they did not care about the survival of the Mughals, but only wanted to fight for power and control of the court. As a result, these pagan regimes were given the opportunity to grow, and the kingdoms of Mysore, Hyderabad, and Marats rose one after another.

Because the Mughal emperor could only rely on the military generals who rose in the war, he not only could not suppress the rebellion in the land, but also had to continue to divide the land among them in order to allow the military nobles to send troops, and in just a few decades, the country under Aurangzeb was either occupied by the rebel state or divided by the military generals, and the territory controlled by the Mughal dynasty itself was limited to a small space near the capital Delhi. This is a bit of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the power of the Son of Heaven fell aside, and the king's order did not come out of Luoyang City. It's just that the decline of the Zhou Dynasty is the result of the self-improvement of the 800-year-old vassal states, and the Mughal Dynasty has gone through the 800-year history of the Zhou Dynasty in only a few decades, which is really amazing.

In this way, Sindh Province was freed from the direct rule of the Mughal dynasty and became the domain of three Muslim magnates from the territory of the past dynasty, forming three small Muslim states that were divided from each other. Historically, after the British government here, three small countries were merged together.

But the power of the British had not yet penetrated into the Indus Valley, and was expanding in the more commercially and economically developed Bengal and Ganges valleys, blocked by the Kingdom of Mysore and the Marat League from penetrating deep into the heart of India, and for a while and a half would not pay attention to the Indus Valley far west. They really began to intervene here after the Napoleonic Wars, after Britain itself was freed from the continental wars. That was after the 1810s.

Therefore, Henry Pitt could only develop this place independently, or he also took the initiative to avoid the British East India Company and develop it independently.

The troubles encountered can only be solved independently. The trouble he encountered was that the crew of a trading merchant ship of a company had a conflict with a powerful man in the local area, and then the crew was killed in the street, and the captain of the ship negotiated with the local government, but the influence of the powerful was too great, and the local government seized the merchant ship and expelled the captain and other crew members.

At that time, the captain left Karachi and passed through the nearby Portuguese colony of Goa to Calcutta, which was controlled by the East India Company, because the two companies were allies, so the captain asked the British East India Company for help, but was rejected and ridiculed by the East India Company, advising them not to act alone, and the words revealed that without the protection of the East India Company, it would be difficult for them to survive in India.

This attitude annoyed Henry Pitt, but his own strength was limited. After the company's assets were liquidated with Zhou Lang, all the fleet was transferred to Zhou Lang, and the company only retained eight armed merchant ships, that is, merchant ships such as the Oriental Dawn and Xie Qinggao's Fortune led by Harald. If they were sent to Karachi, they would also pose a threat to the local Indian government, but the operation did not go well, and the other side did not care about the threat, but intensified the conflict, and they forbade the company's ships to enter Karachi trade again.

The commercial base that had been opened up with great difficulty was lost, and Henry Pitt could not accept this result, but the British and East India Companies would not help him, and the company was also a chartered trading company authorized by Zhou Lang's regime in legal terms, so he naturally had to ask for help from Zhou Lang.

Zhou Lang listened to the process of Henry Pitt's narration in detail, and also asked some relevant content, and learned that because it was believed to belong to the direct territory of the Mughal Dynasty in the past, the Mughal Dynasty was once quite powerful, and the European colonists did not establish a base in the Indus Valley, and now the Europeans are mainly concentrated in the southern and eastern regions of the Indian Peninsula, and have not yet established colonies in the Indus Valley.

The navigable conditions of this river are not bad, and large merchant ships can go directly up to the Punjab region, which is the richest in the middle reaches of the Indus River, and the development prospects are very huge.

Henry Pitt hoped that Zhou Lang would provide a fleet to blockade the Indus River and send an infantry force capable of capturing Karachi, and Henry Pitt hoped to use military pressure to bring the local lords into submission. When necessary, Henry Pitt hoped that Zhou Lang would authorize him to establish a colony in the Indus Valley.

After listening to this, Zhou Lang felt that this was a huge opportunity, when the British were still worried about Napoleon, he could occupy some colonies in India that the British could not estimate, Zhou Lang knew very well that the glory of the empire on which the sun never set was built on the basis of sucking blood from Indians, and Zhou Lang was not extremely interested in sucking India's blood, because China itself was rich enough, as long as the national power was mobilized in a commercial way, it was enough to compete with the whole of Europe.

But Britain can't, they don't have enough human resources, India has supplemented their shortcomings, so Zhou Lang's expansion in India is simply killing three birds with one stone, one can get commercial wealth from here, expand the export of Chinese goods, two to prevent this from becoming a British sphere of influence, and the third is to block Britain's ability to obtain human and material resources from here, one increase and one decrease, and the role of containing Britain is very significant.

So although it is still at war, Zhou Lang still happily agreed to Henry Pitt's request and gave him relevant authorization.

Henry Pitt was overjoyed, and apparently he saw the example of the Englishman Clevou who had made a name for himself in England after the capture of Bengal, and he felt that his opportunity had come to make a difference.

Zhou Lang also hoped that he could establish a brilliant career, Zhou Lang's eyes were always looking to the future, the unification of China is the present, and the colonial development is the future.

In addition to Henry Pitt's hope for the development of India, Zhou Lang was more concerned about the development of Northwest America.

A month ago, Zhu Li's fleet set sail again, carrying Chen Zhouquan and more than 1,000 of Chen Zhouquan's subordinates, to the Americas.