Chapter 249 Revolution Entered to the Vikings

When the Anglo-French War was raging, the merchants of the Chinese Empire were not idle, and a steady stream of arms and materials were sent to these two countries, and the exchange of things basically did not belong to precious metals and currency, and most of them were exchanged for land, forests, islands and rivers, the right to contract roads, the right to operate municipal facilities, or investment projects such as factories, mines and schools for investment in the local area. Western Europe was still poor and white in the Middle Ages at this time, and it could not withstand the dumping and plundering of the empire at all, and the two small countries with a combined population of only 10 million could not even compare with the purchasing power market in the Goryeo region.

Bankrupt tenant farmers who lost their land tenancy rights (Britain and France industrialized early because of cheap imported grain and sheep cannibalism) successfully found subsistence work in the new urban workshops and factories, and the war gave the population a lot of places to go. Compared to the Tudor era, the peasants of Western Europe in this era were much happier.

Merchants of the Chinese Empire, who were busy buying and prospering, also went to the Nordic region, where birds don't, and these merchants who came to Scandinavia and Jutland were surprised to find that a lot of resources and wealth were buried underground and undeveloped, and countless wealth and business opportunities were hidden in the territories of ignorant Nordic nobles. A few shrewd businessmen spearheaded the formation of the Nordic trade alliance (the Oslo Group) to create a Chinese version of the Hanseatic League. However, this alliance is not an exclusive privileged monopoly alliance, but a giant syndicate that invests in and controls the Nordic resource industry and agriculture.

The first investment was a whopping 70,000 florins. Bought more than 40 iron and copper mines in Sweden. More than a dozen of Norway's best sheltered fjords have been fenced off as whaling ports and supply ports. Numerous fishing ports within the Baltic Sea and thriving transit ports connecting the interior of Poland and the wider Eastern European region in the south were also developed. Honey, beeswax, mink, timber, grain, leather, medicinal herbs, and ores from the vast and sparsely populated regions of Eastern Europe were finally able to be exchanged for tropical products from Western Europe and the Far East, and many merchants who had acquired agency rights and port shares were able to obtain Oriental goods and various iron and steel products re-exported from Gibraltar at FOB prices.

The Nordic regime established by the Vikings was actually quite mature. It's much better than hundreds of years ago, when our ancestors sailed everywhere in search of land under the sun and burned and looted. The Vikings' notoriety was mainly due to the barren lands and cold climate of northern Europe, which did not produce enough food for the growing population, and had to migrate and expand. But the Viking colonies scattered throughout Europe were soon assimilated and integrated by the highly feudal civilizations of the region, and there was hardly a single one that was not Christianized and integrated. In the face of this fact, the pioneers of the Chinese Empire, who had heard of the Vikings' notoriety, did not take the Vikings' simple tribal alliance performance seriously, after all, they had seen countless tribes for a long time.

In the villages near the Arctic Circle in the north, there is also a tradition of Vikings farming when they are busy farming and going out to sea to rob when they are not working. The warmer regions, a little further south, have been settled for many years, and the Viking settlements that have absorbed the 'advanced' agricultural techniques of Central and Western Europe have developed feudal hierarchies and estates similar to those of Western Europe. The three kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden (including Finland), and Norway were the joint tribal formations of the Vikings into feudal Christian kingdoms.

The Nordic region, with a population of only a few million in total, is in even greater decline. The glory of the North Sea Empire a hundred years ago has long since faded, and after the end of the piracy era, the whole of Northern Europe has slowly become a conservative region that has lost its enterprising spirit. With them, the ancestors' ambitions to build colonies and trade networks across the seas followed. The trade networks of northern Central Europe, the Baltic coast, Poland, Scotland, and Kievan Rus', which had been monopolized by the Vikings, were slowly being carved up by the new local merchants, and even the merchant ships sailing on the main arteries of the Skagerrak Strait and the Kattegat Strait were no longer tall wooden longships, but were replaced by flying clippers from the Chinese Empire and the pot-bellied galen ships of the New Beihai Company.

Seeing that the defeated generals of the past (Britain, France and Germany) had grown after taking refuge in the big financiers of the Chinese Empire, the shrewd traders who cooperated with the investors of the Chinese Empire were making a lot of money. The Nordic countries could not help but envy and hate. The estates that the military aristocracy had worked so hard to build and the estates that had been painstakingly run for generations could not be compared to the income generated by investing in a mine or opening a workshop. Naturally, there is a feeling of imbalance.

Many of the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in trading and producing mineral raw materials for export, had stood firmly on the opposite side of the conservative forces, and had called on the king to open up more land, approve more mergers and acquisitions, and set up more companies, lower tax rates, and completely abolish the system of slavery and subordinate peasants.

As soon as there is a proper profit, capital is emboldened. If there is a 10 percent profit, it is guaranteed to be used everywhere; With twenty percent profit, it becomes active; With a 50 percent profit, it takes a risk; For the sake of 100 percent profit, it dares to trample on all human laws; With a profit of 300 percent, it dares to commit any crime, even risking hanging its head. Although this is not Lao Ma's original, it is still very imposing to quote. In this pre-industrial era of gold, which industry did not have an average annual profit margin that was at a risk-taking level?

In order to make money, the Vikings, who possessed the bandit genes, naturally quickly split, and the radicals were naturally young people who were captivated by wealth and the culture of modern enjoyment-level life from the East. And the old-fashioned aristocracy who had not yet been Christianized naturally opposed this extravagant and depraved model of selling their ancestral lands for wealth.

If there is a contradiction, then the old trick of supporting the pro-China faction in the cultural export strategy formulated by Bai Jia, a master who can create problems without problems, is also a good trick, and the export revolution has a market. Whenever there is a conflict between vested interest groups in a country. At the right time, the ruler fosters a faction that meets the needs of the country by bringing in foreign aid that he thinks is suitable, and no matter what the means, the process of thoroughly controlling the country's discourse is called luring the wolf into the house. There are countless classic cases of traveling through old time and space, and the most famous ones who played this indirect control method were the Soviet Union and the United States.

Whether it is a color revolution or an export red revolution, it is the pioneer of cultural and ideological imports. Let the intellectuals and the people at the bottom who have the control of public opinion support the opposition parties (civil organizations, secret societies) to elect and seize power, the radical ones are to support the armed coup d'état of the officers, and the impatient ones are to directly send troops to behead the head of the enemy country and kill the head of the enemy country. Weak countries and marginal areas with little national interests can be directly annexed.

Obviously, at this time, there is no opponent in Europe who is worth going through the great effort to learn from the United States and the Soviet Union, and this is just a game stage for the students below to practice. The real destination is the political situation and bloc struggles in the country.

At this time, although the Chinese Empire did not enter space and did not have an opponent in the Cold War, it was still as early as possible to carry out preparations for large-scale immigration, create public opinion, cultivate a leading party, ideological brainwashing, import the culture and values of the Chinese Empire, infrastructure construction, and surveying and mapping sites for colonial bases and factories and mines.

In the preparation work in full swing, the focus is on the establishment of schools and newspapers, so that the illiterate can become literate people, so that the output task can be twice as effective with half the effort. None of the profits and wealth from trade went back to the country, and all of it was turned into wages for hiring locals to build various facilities. Spending these numbers on the books is not as heart-wrenching as the gold and silver that has been shipped back. These profits can't be used for dividends anyway.

After the goods and various means of production purchased by the Chenji Group flowed into Europe, the local handicraft industry was almost non-existent, and in addition to the pillar industries (raw material export and primary processing) that were deliberately spared, a large number of laborers entered the various construction teams, mines, forestry farms, docks of commercial cities, trading houses, hospitals, and municipal companies recruited workers in the country. The number of people engaged in handicraft workshops is constantly declining due to bankruptcy and closure.

The accumulation of wealth is concentrated in real estate and human capital, science and technology are almost non-existent, and the industrial sector is almost non-existent. No matter who it is, the money earned in Europe is circulated in the banks, insurance, hospitals, and markets under the control of the Chenji Group. Every penny that everyone spends rolls through the industry.

This high-intensity circulation of wealth controlled the hands of the Chinese Empire at every link. Starting from the flow of dragon dollar currency from the extracorporeal circulation into the local area. The power of the conservative aristocracy and the lords of the manors was declining. Almost all of these conservatives' economic resources were in the hands of foreign merchants (mainly compradors and merchants of the Chinese Empire), and the already uncompetitive locally produced grains and grains were sold more expensive than Seljuk (Anatolian region) and Indian wheat shipped thousands of miles away, and if they were sold cheaply, they would lose both the seed money and the cost of threshing. There was really no choice but to diversify the business, plant trees and open the ancestral mines, and after softening their attitudes, they began to slowly move closer to the open market-oriented radicals, and the most resolute hard-nosed conservatives have been starved to death by the market and prices.

Marketization and free trade are the most capable of turning a nomadic or agrarian nation into a commercial nation, and any commercial nation has no right to speak in the face of a more powerful top nation that can manipulate the pricing power of bulk commodities, and even a self-sufficient agricultural nation is more effective and confident than a merchant nation.

This method of killing people without seeing blood and bloodletting without seeing red is the implantation of marketization and money worship. Vikings were originally motivated by trade profits to switch from fishermen and farmers to pirates and merchants. The main nations of Europe are all adhering to this style of trade if they can fight and fight if they can't, all the way to the information society. And the descendants of those Nordic barbarians with a relatively low level of education will soon bow down in front of the advanced and powerful Chinese civilization.

Historically, the price revolution was the fundamental driving force behind the disintegration of feudal societies in Europe. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment only provided for the construction of the spiritual and political civilization of capitalist society, and it was the bankruptcy tide of the feudal manor economy driven by the price revolution that destroyed the feudal social and economic foundation. This kind of direct approach belongs to the field of non-violence, and it is a field that the military feudal aristocracy who can only solve problems in the field of violent means is not good at, and if they do not obey, they will have a way to perish. When the middle and lower nobles either went bankrupt or changed their courts to become shareholders and new nobility with pensions, the big nobles lost the basis of their power, and the standing army and the police and judicial system, which were supported by the central treasury to protect the lower vassals and subjects, were supported by the modern tax system, and the power was vested in the central government that fulfilled these obligations. When the advisers from Huaxia presented this beautiful blueprint to several puppet kings, none of them saw that the core of the matter was how to draw the boundary between their own rights and the rights of the central government.

When the royal property as an example also began to pay taxes, the theoretical basis of the king under the law will appear, the constitutional monarchy is the only result, when the time is right, a referendum or a constituent assembly, European countries will soon become the provinces of the Chinese Empire in the Europa region, just like Japan and South Korea and other countries before become part of the empire without a single soldier. (To be continued......)