After staying up all night, Li You only felt a little dizzy and didn't feel very tired, but his body was sticky because of sweating, which made him feel uncomfortable.

He pushed open the window to see that it was still a little dark outside, and then reached out and pulled the rope on the side of the desk. Soon the Indian servant downstairs was woken up by the sound of the bell and hurried up. This is what Li You is most satisfied with here, the Indian servants here are industrious and docile, and they are much better than the native servants he met in the South Seas.

"Can you help me boil some hot water? I want to take a bath. Li You, who was tidying up the table, commanded the Indian servant who walked into the room without raising his head.

The Indian servant, who had a rough understanding of Chinese, begged Li You to repeat it again before replying: "Yes, sir, please wait for half an hour, and I will come up and tell you when I have hot water ready..."

Li You, who was sitting on a bamboo recliner waiting, accidentally fell asleep, and it took a moment for the Indian servant to wake him up. When Li You went downstairs into the bathroom, the water in the wooden bathtub didn't seem to be steaming much anymore. The Indian servant asked him with some uneasiness if he needed to boil some more hot water.

Li You tested the temperature of the water, then took off his clothes and said, "No need, but by the way, take the clothes I changed into and wash them, I hope I can dry them before leaving the boat." ”

The Indian servant took his clothes and heard the sound of the door shut, and then he relaxed and half-lay down in the bathtub, and the warm water soaked his shoulders, making his whole body relaxed.

The nap he had just taken seemed to have completely replenished his energy, and made him think about the business information he had seen last night.

According to the information gathered by the merchants, the best handicrafts on this continent are all kinds of cotton cloth. For example, muslin produced in the region is very famous, and a large number of cotton cloth producers have gathered around Dhaka this year; Not far away, the North Coromandel coast produces fine white muslin; Further afield, calico produced on the South Columand Coast was a highly sought-after commodity for Europeans; In addition, there are silk and cotton blended fabrics produced in the Gujarat region of the west coast.

These cotton textiles produced in India are almost distinctively different from those produced by the Ming Dynasty. Even the merchants of the Ming Dynasty were very impressed by the excellent skills of these Indian textile workers. Therefore, the staff of the merchant hall believe that the textile industry in India may be the biggest obstacle to the export of Daming cotton cloth to the Indian Ocean and Europe in the future.

However, after reading some of the investigation reports of these staff on the Indian textile industry, Li You thought that this possibility was actually unlikely. He knows something about the textile industry of Daming, and he does not think that the textile industry in India can cause any obstacles to the textile industry of Daming.

In fact, he thinks that what can cause any obstacles to the Daming textile industry should be the too fierce competition between Daming textile factories. As a result, textile factories are looking for ways to reduce costs in order to improve their profitability. However, this also makes each factory adopt a positive attitude towards new technologies and new machines, and those that refuse to respond are eventually eliminated.

But India's small producers and the Ming textile factories are completely different things, although they also have excellent textile skills, and the development of textile machinery is not much behind the Ming, but India's small producers lack the power to protect themselves.

Since His Majesty Chongzhen ascended the throne, he forcibly abolished the feudal family master system in the handicraft workshop, stipulated that even if he used his own slaves and maids in the factory, he must be paid, and not less than two-thirds of the wages of hired workers, and allowed slaves and maids to redeem themselves and a series of laws.

Although this still did not completely solve the problem of some factory owners exploiting workers by forced labor, for the first time in law, the workers of the Ming Dynasty were legally given the right to sell their labor freely, without having to be forced to work without compensation by others.

But this is not the case in mainland India, where the management of grassroots society is almost no different from that of the Ming Dynasty in the past. Neither the officials of the Ming Dynasty nor the feudal lords of India interfered in the affairs of the countryside except for taxation and labor. It's just that the Ming Dynasty managed the countryside with gentry and clans, while the village communities in mainland India were managed by landlords.

On the Indian mainland, the village community is the cornerstone of the whole society, and both farmers and craftsmen must belong to a village community, which is both managed and protected by the community and exploited by the upper classes of the community. A peasant or craftsman who is driven out of the village is equivalent to losing his identity and status, and eventually becoming the lowest pariah, which is equivalent to being abandoned by the whole society.

Therefore, the peasants and handicraftsmen in India have a deeper personal attachment to the landlord than in the countryside of the Ming Dynasty. As a result, the handicraftsmen must first serve the residents and landlords of the village community, and the surplus products can be sold to the market, otherwise it is a crime.

The great skill of the Indian weavers, to some extent, was not produced for the needs of the market, but for the needs of the landlords.

When the beauty of Indian cotton attracted the attention of European merchants, it did not actually improve the lives of these Indian textile workers, but rather opened up a new source of income for the Indian landlords.

Indian businessmen clearly know what kind of society they live in, and they know how to use the rules they are familiar with to make the most of it. Rather than raising the purchase price of cotton cloth in order to stimulate the production of artisans, it was better to monopolize the power to trade cotton cloth with foreign merchants.

And in a society like the Indian continent, it is not difficult to monopolize the cotton cloth produced by the craftsmen. As long as the feudal lords and landlords were bought, the craftsmen in the village community did not dare to sell cotton cloth to foreign merchants who were not allowed to do so. These Indian merchants could force the craftsmen to produce cloth for themselves at a fixed price with a small amount of money in advance.

The clerks of the merchant house referred to this behavior of the Indian merchants as the buying system, believing that it promoted to a certain extent the further division of labor among the village craftsmen, thus organizing the production of larger commodities on the basis of scattered small production. In this way, it may be possible to have a production organization comparable to that of the Daming Textile Factory.

Li You felt that these employees were simply thinking too much. Although the factory owners of Daming wanted to make more money as a whole, most of the money they earned was spent on reinvesting in the factory. These buyers seem to be constantly expanding the organization of production for small producers, but most of the profits they make from the cotton business are spent on bribes to feudal lords and landlords, as well as on personal enjoyment.

Once the cotton market changes, the Ming factory owners will probably survive for a while, but the small producers in India will almost immediately go bankrupt. After all, the relationship between the contractor and the small producer is in fact similar to that of the landlord to the tenant farmer, who gives almost nothing but takes most of the profits of the small producer and the tenant farmer.

Therefore, the fluctuation of the cotton cloth market has little impact on the bag buyers, and at most it is just a refusal to accept the agreed cotton cloth. However, for small producers who have already invested in production costs, if they cannot monetize their products as soon as possible, they will not only be unable to reproduce, but even their families will not be able to afford to survive.

The reason why Indian cotton cloth can still compete with Daming cotton cloth overseas is because the production cost of the two sides is not much different, and the quality is not much different. For the world, cotton cloth is still an emerging textile, and the market capacity is huge, so both sides are unwilling to do things to reduce prices and compete, and they can sell it anyway.

In addition, Europe, the largest new demand market, is nearly a third less than the distance to mainland India than to China, so it is naturally more cost-effective to buy Indian cotton cloth back to Europe. So now European businessmen are buying more and more cotton cloth in India, which gives the staff of the merchant hall the illusion that the cotton textile industry in India is developing rapidly, and it may threaten the cotton textile industry in the future in the country.

Thinking of this, Li You suddenly thought of two interesting things. The first thing is, if we continue to allow the Indian cotton textile industry to flourish, so that a large number of Indian laborers will be invested in the cotton textile industry, will there be an uprising of bankrupt handicraftsmen once the price of cotton cloth in the market is suppressed and the small producers in India go bankrupt?

The second thing is that the local merchants seem to be a little too powerful, not only do they bribe the local lords in exchange for privileges, but some merchants also borrow money from the lords, manage the land and business for the lords, and even simply take over the finances of the territory for the lords. If they could get their own banks deep into the Indian continent, would they be able to control the local lords by cooperating with these merchants?

When Li You lowered his head and thought about these two new ideas, and walked out of the bathing room with his clothes on, he suddenly found a dark figure standing in front of him.

He subconsciously took a step back, only to look up, and after seeing who the black shadow was, he asked with some displeasure: "Your Highness is not going to prepare your luggage, what are you doing standing here... Did you shave your head? ”

Looking at the broken hair on King Yangqu's head that didn't fall below his shoulders, Li You asked in some shock. Zhu Mindu, who was wearing a cyan cotton robe, was actually still terrified in his heart, but after seeing Li You's rare gaffe, he nodded and said: "Yes, although the parents who have suffered from the body do not dare to destroy it, but since Your Majesty can invent the will for the sake of the country, how can you patronize your good reputation as a courtier."

What's more, His Majesty ordered me to go to sea so that I could learn to do things, and this long hair is inconvenient to take care of, hindering daily life, so I should naturally follow the power. So I hired a shaver here to help me get rid of this problem. ”

Li You, who put away his surprise, looked at King Yangqu for a long time before returning to his usual tone and asked, "Then Your Highness is standing here, isn't he waiting for me?" ”

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