New Book Collection: The Rise of Great Powers 1900

――――――――――――

The economic situation in the sixth year of Longwu (1652) was much better than Yang Chao expected.

Yang Chao thought that after last year's financial crisis, he would need to recuperate for at least two or three years before it could stabilize, but he did not expect that the economy would rebound strongly this year, and the first three months of the year were relatively calm, and since April, the economic situation has suddenly warmed up.

The most pleasing to Yang Chao is the hot situation of the textile industry, in fact, the relationship with Yang Chao's support is not big, because the support for textile production, including encouraging mulberry and silkworm breeding, is only this year's policy, the policy effect is always lagging behind, the reason for this economic boom, or because of market reasons.

After Yang Chao stabilized Jiangnan in recent years, Jiangnan enjoyed the dividends of peace, and various economic indicators should have recovered to their heyday, especially after the opening of sea trade, a large number of exports stimulated production.

It is precisely because of the boom in overseas trade that the economic rebound this year has been supported, or if it were not for Yang Chao's indiscriminate interference in the financial market, which led to financial chaos, I am afraid that the economic boom would have started last year.

Although the Dutch were only able to bring back a shipment of goods from China every year, the East India Company had a strong sense of business, and their orders were placed in batches, so that prices were kept to a stable level, which also allowed the textile households to get orders for a long time, and to a certain extent, they obtained long-term benefits.

In recent years, the Dutch have sold war horses to Yang Chao and opened up the entrepot trade in Japan, and they have a lot of money to purchase goods from the Ming Dynasty.

During these years, the Dutch sold 100,000 war horses to Yang Chao. Although now the price of horses has been compressed to a hundred taels of silver. However, the Dutch could already supply Yang Chao with 30,000 war horses a year. That's three million taels of silver.

These horses are indeed good horses, but Yang Chao already knows that these horses are not Western horses, but Indian horses purchased by the Dutch from India, the distance between India and the Arabian Peninsula, coupled with the continuous invasion of Muslims in history, allowed the Indians to get Arabian horses, after improvement. The breed of Indian horse was bred.

Overall, the quality of Indian horses is still good, especially the quality of being more suitable for Jiangnan makes Yang Chao more satisfied, and can adapt to the hot weather like India, there is no need to adapt to the climate of Jiangnan, which has an advantage over Mongolian horses.

Yang Chao even planned to equip all the cavalry with more explosive Indian horses, and the conditions were also there, because the Dutch had built a large-scale horse farm in Taiwan and raised horses on a large scale in order to run the war horse business. In that place in Taiwan, deerskin was produced in this era. A place where a large number of deer can live, such as where horses can be raised.

The Dutch even negotiated with Yang Chao, hoping that Yang Chao would purchase 50,000 horses next year, which shows the scale of their horse farm in Taiwan.

If there are 50,000 horses guaranteed every year, Yang Chao will have the conditions to equip the cavalry with this kind of horse, not to mention that Yang Chao's horse farm has also begun to produce more than 30,000 Indian horses and Mongolian horses every year.

In addition to the war horse trade, the Dutch also took advantage of the good opportunity during the integration of the Zheng clan to greatly expand the trade with Japan, and they could also harvest three million taels of silver from Japan every year. With the money obtained by the Dutch from other places, the annual purchase volume from China reached 10 million taels, which has surpassed Japan's 500 taels and has become Yang Chao's first trading partner.

However, the Dutch and Japanese imports were similar, mainly silk and porcelain.

Since the export tariff on silk is only 30 percent, and raw silk is as high as 300 percent, so the export of silk has replaced the export of raw silk, and the Japanese find that the quality is better, and the prevention of better silk is far better than the local goods they spun with the high price of fine raw silk of the Ming Dynasty, and the Japanese basically rarely buy their own goods.

The Dutch are naturally even more so, they were originally in Yang Chao's high tariffs, porcelain turned to Japan, raw silk turned to India imports, but after Yang Chao hit Japan's porcelain production, they can only accept high-priced Chinese porcelain, anyway, the quality is the best, and after reducing silk tariffs, the Dutch found that direct import of silk is more popular in the Western market, because the silk produced with the world's highest-quality Huzhou silk and the most exquisite silk weaving technology of the Chinese is far better than the quality of Western silk.

As China, which has thousands of years of silk weaving technology accumulation and the best quality silk production area, if India has an opponent in cotton spinning, then there is absolutely no opponent in silk weaving.

The Dutch have had in-depth exchanges with the silk weaving workshops in Jiangnan, they take out the most popular silk weaving types in the West and let these people spin, and there is basically no type of silk in the world that Chinese cannot weave, and the result is that the silk weaving production of Westerners is basically unnecessary.

It's just different from what Yang Chao imagined, Yang Chao always thought that the reason why the West has been importing a large number of Chinese silk products in this era is that the Chinese have more sophisticated technology and better quality, and Westerners do not have such technology, but this is only the least important reason.

And the main reason is because of the low price, taking raw silk as an example, the pure white raw silk in Jiangnan, the price per load is basically about sixty taels, but the raw silk of the Indians is one hundred and fifty taels, the cost of raw silk determines the price of silk, obviously the price of silk in India is higher. Japan's is higher than India's, and Westerners produce more than Japan's.

Almost the world is the cheapest price in Daming, if it is really more productive it would be good, the real reason is because the purchasing power of silver is different, Daming is not a silver-producing country, although there is no shortage of silver, but most of them are hidden, so there is still a shortage of silver on the market, so Yang Chao has to find ways to make money.

It is precisely because of this scarcity that silver has the highest purchasing power in the world in China, which has led to the fact that ordinary Japanese people can also use the high-quality silk of the Ming Dynasty, and the Chinese silk fabrics are transported to the West by sea and land. There are still profits of up to 300 percent.

Other words. A world where silver is the currency. The Ming currency is seriously undervalued, fortunately there is no US imperialist in this era, otherwise it would be time to force the Ming currency to appreciate.

This huge difference in purchasing power made Daming's silk fabrics knock the world's silk fabrics to the ground, and India, the only opponent worth mentioning, was powerless to parry.

In later generations, as soon as the Indian government lowered the tariff on China's raw silk, there were silkworm farmers in India who committed suicide, and I don't know if there was such a tragic thing in this era.

It's just that in the field of cotton textiles, the Indians are still ahead of the Ming Dynasty. The Dutch still imported mainly cotton textiles from India, and the cotton textiles imported from Songjiang Province were mainly exported to Japan rather than to the West, and according to the accounts of the East India Company, they purchased far more cotton cloth from India each year than silk and porcelain.

Compared with silk and porcelain, cotton cloth is a bulk commodity, and silk and porcelain are always a luxury, not something that ordinary people can use.

"No, we have to let the Dutch import cotton cloth from Daming. Indians cotton cloth is cheaper. It's because their cotton is cheaper, not because their labor is cheaper. It's not more efficient either. ”

In the case of silver denomination, the Ming has the world's ultra-low labor costs, and there is no need to rely on a large number of oppressed female and child laborers to defeat India's textile industry like the British Industrial Revolution during the Industrial Revolution.

But India's cotton industry is incomparable to the Ming Dynasty, there is no way, just like the silkworm was founded by the Chinese, cotton is generally believed to be the first to be planted by Indians, and even the cotton species of the Ming Dynasty may be Indian cotton.

And compared with the Ming Dynasty, the Indians may not have an advantage in other aspects, but in the area of cultivated land is completely exploded in the Ming Dynasty, the conditions of the Indian subcontinent are unique, the area of arable land is almost more than twice that of the Ming Dynasty, and the planting conditions are also better, there is no shortage of water at all, and there are more adequate sunlight conditions, almost the most suitable production area for cotton.

The conditions required for cotton production are nothing more than arable land, sunshine and irrigation, and manpower, all four types of Indians are not lacking, and in this case their cotton prices are one-third lower than those of the Ming Dynasty.

The ledger he got from Nassau was similar to the one provided by Zheng, and when Yang Chao was convinced of it, he immediately discussed with Nassau that he was going to attack the cotton textile industry of the Indians.

You must know that in all industrial countries, industrialization began with the textile industry, or from the cotton textile industry, no matter how hard you try, the amount of silkworm ginseng is definitely not as good as that of flowering cotton, so the price of cotton cloth is lower, more suitable for ordinary people, and the scale of production can also be larger.

When the British were able to become the world's factories and be the first to complete the industrial revolution, didn't they step on the bones of Indian textile workers.

The law of the jungle between countries is also about the survival of the fittest, an era is often only a single country, Yang Chao will not let others surpass China, so the textile industry of the Ming Dynasty must stand in the forefront of the world.

"I hope the Dutch can import cotton from India to sell in Daming. The Governor will take duty-free measures on cotton imports. ”

"At the same time, tariffs on cotton textiles will be reduced to 10 percent."

Yang Chao immediately threw these two red dates to Nassau, and Nassau was naturally very pleased, he was always worried about what China needed, what the Dutch could provide, and now it's okay, the Chinese themselves put forward what they wanted.

Nassau took advantage of the situation and made a request: "I hope that Daming will guarantee the Dutch East India Company the exclusive operation of the cotton trade from India to Daming!" ”

The bandit logic of Westerners makes them always make demands on the Eastern peoples with the audacity.

Yang Chao had never agreed to it before, unless he exchanged it for reciprocal terms.

But this time he agreed for the first time.

Only one condition was proposed: "In exchange, the Dutch are to reduce the import of cotton cloth from India, and allow the Doge to send someone to monitor it!" ”

Nassau hesitated again, to be honest, their trade volume with India is much larger than that with China, and the loss is too heavy to rashly cut off India's cotton clothing trade. (To be continued......)