After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, land annexation became increasingly serious, and the wind of land "donation" prevailed. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoAlthough in the early years of Wanli, Zhang Juzheng was vigorous and resolute in clearing the land and inhibiting the annexation. But when people die, the wind of dedication is even stronger.

The royal family, princes, relatives, and lords were at the top of the feudal hierarchy. The "public land" they were given was recorded in the "Golden Book", and they were not naturalized and enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from taxes, grain, and servitude.

Although the private land other than the land should be "the whole people as an errand", but after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the law was abolished, and the magnates became more unscrupulous. In fact, all the fields of the royal palace and the nobles enjoyed the privilege of exempting all food shortages.

The gentry other than the nobility were also a privileged class, and although they were lower than the nobility, they were higher than the common people. They also enjoy preferential exemptions. Unlike the aristocratic preferential exemption, they are exempt from the quota of goods.

Taking the "preferential exemption rule" in the 38th year of Wanli as an example, the current Jingguan Jiake is exempted from 10,000 mu of first-grade free land, and the following is decreasing to 2,700 mu of eight-grade free land, and the foreign officials are halved, and the official of Zhishi Township is exempted from 6/10 of this product, and the maximum of 3,350 mu of preferential and exempted land of the squire of Weishi is 3,350 mu, and the number of students and supervisors is 80 mu.

Legally, the quota preferential exemption requires that the "surplus land" other than the preferential and exempted fields be on an errand with the people. However, the gentry rank, like the nobility, ignored the decrees of the imperial court and acted according to customary rights.

These royal families, princes, relatives, lords, and the gentry and bureaucracy of the Ming Dynasty "did not have one hand or one foot to serve in the public service, and none of them had a single penny or grain to serve in the service." The land ownership of the peasants at the bottom of the Ming Dynasty was ruthlessly deprived, which brought them endless suffering.

During the Hongwu period, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, once decreed that "those who reclaim additional land will never be able to pay taxes", that is, they will never collect taxes. But when they were consecrated, they had to pay heavy grain and land rents, and were reduced from yeoman farmers to tenants, tenants, or servants.

For the part of the peasants who cultivated the land that paid grain to the imperial court, after the land was surrendered, they often had two taxes on one field and two taxes for one body, and they had to bear feudal obligations to the state and the donors at the same time.

For those peasants who "voluntarily" surrendered in order to escape heavy service, although they were freed from state servitude, they were replaced by feudal obligations and stronger personal attachment to the nobles and officials, and their difficult situation would not be improved either.

For those peasants who were not surrendered and were still under the control of the government, the burden increased dramatically. The more land and population controlled by the princes and nobles, the gentry and bureaucracy, the less the state controlled, and the taxes, grains, and taxes levied by the imperial court not only did not decrease because of this, but increased day by day.

The feudal obligations of the land and population that the magnates had paid to the state were passed on to the existing peasants who had not yet been surrendered, thus greatly increasing the burden on the peasants at the bottom.

Taxation and taxation were the two pillars of the feudal state's existence. However, due to large-scale land annexation, the land and households controlled by the state have decreased sharply, so that a serious situation has been formed in which "there is no king and people in the city" and "all the households of the township officials" have been formed.

In fact, this dangerous situation was already expected by Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty. In order to prevent trouble, the "Da Ming Order" in the early years of Hongwu prohibited contributions. Of course, the Ming emperors of the past dynasties were also well aware of the disadvantages of dedication, and almost every generation also issued bans and prohibitions, and some were even very strict.

However, the feudal era was a powerful society, and the court laws and regulations were often fictitious. Most of the people who benefited from the land donation were the feudal royal clans, foreign relatives and courtiers, and the bureaucratic gentry, and these people formed a privileged class that was the basis of the feudal dynasty's rule, and how could they effectively prohibit and sanction the contribution.

The greedy feudal ruling class of the Ming Dynasty took the benefits of the small people and lost the fair endowment, while the heavy taxes and servitudes had to be passed on to the vast number of low-level peasants.

According to the records of the Ming Dynasty, the peak of the number of acres of land in the Ming Dynasty was about 12254291 hectares, and the royal family and gentry occupied more than 60% of the total area of the land without grain in these lands.

In the late Ming Dynasty, during the Chongzhen period, the frenzy of land annexation had caused more than 90 percent of the land to be concentrated in the hands of the gentry and landlord class, with one-tenth of those owning land and nine-tenths of being tenants.

A large number of peasants lost their land and turned into tenants, and even became slaves, and the Ming Dynasty also lost a large number of taxes, resulting in the entire Ming Dynasty in the middle and late Ming Dynasty The state finance has been in a bleak business income and serious imbalance, until the end of the Ming Dynasty Chongzhen era, the annual tax is only a few million taels, not to mention the war, even if the country is governed is only barely maintained.

Moreover, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the land rent of tenants in various places was extremely high, and at that time, two-thirds of the harvest of one mu of land in Jiangnan had to be handed over to the landlords.

Later generations had different opinions about the population at the end of the Ming Dynasty. The last national official statistics of the Ming Dynasty were more than 50 million people, and the time was the first year of Taichang of Ming Guangzong.

However, this official population figure is incomplete, and it is only the official knowledge of the taxed population. There is also a large number of people who are hidden.

Many scholars in later generations believe that, on the whole, the population at the end of the Ming Dynasty was about 200 million, which has now become the mainstream view in the field of population history.

Because most of the low-level people became tenants and servants under the names of the Ming Dynasty's royal family, relatives and nobles, and gentry and bureaucrats, they were not included in the official statistics. Moreover, since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the number of displaced people in various places has increased year by year, especially the great drought in Chongzhen has caused tens of millions of low-level people in the north to become displaced people.

Western historians have often portrayed overseas colonization as a pioneering history of explorers, and attributed the discovery of the New World to the adventurous spirit of Europeans. Actually, that's not the case at all.

In the late Middle Ages, Europeans were also caught up in the contradiction of more people and less land, and the madness of land annexation was no less than that of the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, and the shadow of land annexation was revealed behind the various wars waged under the guise of religion.

The mutual attacks of the feudal lords brought great suffering to the serfs, and the whole of Europe was tormented by this social contradiction and was about to collapse, and the hatred of the working people and the exploiting classes was on the verge of breaking out.

Because the church and the feudal lords of various countries occupied a large amount of land, they were very afraid that the serfs would turn their hateful eyes on them. As a result, under the bewitchment of the Pope, the feudal lords of various countries mobilized frantically all over Europe and organized a bandit army to invade the East, which was the historical Crusades.

In the past few hundred years, one after another Crusaders have been defeated on the road to the East, but they have alleviated the acute social contradictions of the Europeans at that time.

At the same time, Western royalty began to encourage people to find new living space. The purpose of Columbus and Magellan was neither to explore nor to make a small fortune, but to find a way out of the land conflict.

After Columbus discovered the New World in 1498, for a long time, the main force of colonization was neither aristocratic lords, landlords and old wealth, nor capitalists, but European peasants.

The colonies were the source of raw materials and the place where goods were sold by the suzerain, for example, the largest colonial power, the British did not develop industry in North America, India and Africa, and the supply of consumer goods in the colonies came from the British monopoly trade, which in turn stimulated the appetite of the British capitalists to annex land at home.

Thus, the enclosure movement began, sheep cannibalism drove peasants out of the land in order to meet the demand for trade in the colonies, and from 1495 onwards, the English exile law forcibly drove landless peasants into sweatshops, docks, and mines.

Britain's overseas colonization and the Industrial Revolution were two meat grinders. Overseas colonization was a global land annexation, which brought massacre and enslavement to the colonial people, unlimited profits to the British bourgeoisie, and drove the British working people into hell on earth. (To be continued.) )