Andorra sat a little nervously on the bench, looking at a door in the distance from time to time.

Not far from him was a counter with an iron bar, with only two windows, and a long line of people.

One window is for depositing money, and the other is for withdrawing money.

This is the Rose Bank, a bank that began to rise in various countries three years ago, and I heard that almost every city in Titanya now has such a new type of business, and they are in the business of making money.

For a small miller like Andorra, he never imagined that he would one day come here, even though he had known two years ago from the merchants who often came to their countryside to trade that there were banks that specialized in making money.

At the time, he didn't think it was much different from the loan sharks he had been exposed to.

In the past, he had seen and heard that there were many cases of usury forcing people to break their homes and go crazy, forcing their husbands to sell their wives, children, daughters, and even sell themselves as slaves for others, so he hated usury in his heart, and heard that banks were also in the business of making money, and he was tired of it at the first impression.

Therefore, if he had a choice, he would not be willing to walk dozens of kilometers and trek to the ancient city of Tai, the capital of Titania.

But he inquired in detail, and if he wanted to borrow usury, the interest rate would be as high as more than forty percent, which was still the most merciful, and it was so black that it was impossible to say.

The interest rate of the bank is said to be very low, only 12 percent, which is still the year of more and more commercial borrowing, previously only 10 percent, I heard that the Rose Bank in Titania in order to open up the situation, initially even lowered the one-year interest rate to 8 percent.

Andorra needs a sum of money. He wanted to remodel his mill.

Two years ago. It was almost around the same time as the banks that the appearance of steam-mechanical heat Yan zhòng influenced small business operators like him.

Before him. The owners of small mills and workshops either went bankrupt or sold off their long-established businesses, and they could not compete with the new merchants who used steam equipment.

Of course, there are also many clever small businessmen who know how to be flexible, no longer adhere to any ancestral craftsmanship, a century-old brand, they form a group, raise funds to participate in the construction of industrial zones, and the result is a group production by small workshop owners. Against the industrial zones directly built by certain big businessmen.

Andorra, for example, is more than one step slower, because of the lack of information, his own stubbornness, his reluctance to accept new things, and his location in a remote country town, where he has only one mill and no competitors, so he is not willing to change.

But it wasn't until about half a year ago that the merchants with whom he had been in contact stopped coming, and his mill was in trouble. He was really surprised.

So he went to the ancient city of Thailand and found the merchant who had been doing business before.

The man who could barely be considered an old friend wasn't a bad person. Just leading him out to see the price of flour and the like in the city now made Andorra understand why.

He said goodbye in frustration, walked dozens of kilometers back home, and his wife asked him the result, but he didn't say anything, and was silent for two days before he was willing to speak.

He told his wife that the merchants were no longer willing to come because there was now a steam-powered mill near the city of Taicheng, and the output was dozens or hundreds of times higher than his own, but the price could be much lower than his own.

Later, he stayed up for another two months, but there was still no business, and his wife began to cry with him.

He thought about it for a while, and thought that if his mill could be renovated, he would be able to compete with the steam mills near the city.

The second time he entered the city, he still wanted to find the merchant's help, and at the same time learned more useful things.

He learned that this mode of production, which threatened the survival of many small industrial workshop owners, had originally been transmitted from a country called Asturias.

In that country, a similar workshop renovation began three years ago.

There are two ways to renovate the workshop in front of Andorra, one is to carry out a complete set of renovation of their own workshop alone, but this is very costly, and the small workshop owners who have given up before have not thought about renovation, most of them because they can't afford to renovate now, so it is better to sell it.

The second way is to gather many small workshop owners to join forces, gather together, use their respective industries to complement each other, form a competitive industrial chain, build a facility that can provide huge steam power to share the source power, and each workshop will then transform itself to receive steam power to drive those machines that seem a little unfathomable.

The difference between the first road and the second road is that the second road turns the power into a whole for collective construction and shares the results, reducing the waste of repeated construction, and if the workshops that voluntarily form an industrial chain are gathered together, it reduces the additional costs of transportation in the past, which is beneficial to everyone, but most of the workshops have lost their integrity and are tied together.

But the first path is almost impossible, because it would be equivalent to having to bear the cost of renovation alone, even for a small miller like Andorra.

Unbeknownst to him, when the steam equipment reappeared near St. Quentin with the dwarven craftsmen, the first merchant who volunteered to accept the production transformation did not spend money, and Solomon gave the gentleman a free transformation of the riverside mill in order to promote it, and then it had a huge effect, so the gentleman could not wait to join the first new industrial workshop area built by Solomon.

Andorra was not so lucky, and after knowing the cost to pay, he fell into frustration again.

He couldn't afford the first way, and he didn't have a chance at the second.

Similar to the Asturias exhibition model, Titania quickly embraced this new mode of production, but only expanded into industrial workshop areas near a few large cities.

And to build this kind of industrial workshop area, as mentioned earlier, either you have the money to build many workshops in this kind of community in one go, and it is best to be in an industrial chain, which can form a complementary or upstream and downstream relationship, so as to save costs. It's also easier to get the empire to agree. This is something that only the big businessmen can do.

Either that, a large number of small owners gathered their forces and asked the empire to agree to designate an area for them to relocate and renovate. And the latter does not reach a certain level, and the empire does not look down on it.

It needs to be of a certain size, otherwise the empire will not allow it at all.

And if the empire doesn't allow it, if nothing else, just where the relocation workshop is located, this can't be solved.

You know, the establishment of each of these new industrial workshop areas requires large tracts of land to be put together. Behind this is how much land annexation can be carried out, and how many peasants who originally had a small plot of land to cultivate to support themselves can be forced to go bankrupt, become vagabonds, or become wage laborers in new workshops.

There are deeper interests and contradictions here, because the peasants have leased the land of the lord lord, and not all of them own their own land.

Powerful merchants might be able to hire thugs and samurai to forcibly drive away individual peasants who were unable to resist, but not so easily for lords, who were often of the aristocratic class.

Also, if there are too many homeless people who have lost their land, and it is impossible to recruit them into the workshop, they gather together, and there is instigation. It's easy to get into trouble, and there was some kind of rebel army some time ago.

So there must be violence that can be suppressed and guarded. Well, this is one of the main reasons why the empire is now able to collect taxes from merchants.

And the merchants also quickly learned the Asturian method, one is to divide up, recruit some honest and obedient people into the new workshop, teach them to do things, and then pay them, which not only has the labor needed by the workshop, but also solves the hidden danger of causing trouble.

And those who are not very obedient, of course, there are also ways.

The power of this new type of workshop, which Andorra hated and envied, came from the steam facilities, which were driven by a rock-like thing called black rock, which was placed in a huge boiler or a well-sealed steam engine.

These workshops have proven their productivity in Asturias and Titania, but to keep the ghosts that have been revealed by the dwarven craftsmen alive, they need something called Black Rock.

For this kind of thing, Titania did not stop after ending the Faroucion Plane War three years ago, and they were actively contacting various planes like Asturias, exploring whether they were rich in wealth and minerals, such as black rock.

Andorra had heard the merchant talk about these causes and consequences, but the merchant could only understand this level, and even the shape of this level was actually very distant to Andorra, he just wanted to transform his mill, and he firmly believed that if the transformation was successful, he would not be worse than those who had already achieved success.

The helpless businessman friend had no choice but to point him the way, which is today's Rose Bank.

It is also no less legendary than a new workshop of the steam mill type, which emerged from Titania almost overnight, and is said to have been born out of the banking industry of Asturias, a place far away from Andorra.

But Rose Bank is a rising star, and even the bankers of Asturias have to admit that this rising star has outdone them.

Of course, this may also have something to do with the initial foundations of the banking industry in Asturias, and the starting points of both seem to be different.

There are already dozens of banks in Asturias, the most famous being the Franklin Bank and the Central Bank.

Franklin Bank is a very stable bank, they focus on the traditional deposit business, and external borrowings must be properly collateralized.

The miracle of the central bankers is said to have been that in response to the foreign war in Asturias, merchants under pressure from the kingdom pooled together to raise money, and then lent money to the kingdom in the name of the bank.

Luckily, the merchants won the gamble, and Asturian won two foreign wars in quick succession under seemingly unfavorable circumstances, and instead of losing money, the merchants gained some privileges and business conveniences.

But this is also destined to these two banks, and other Asturias banks that are inferior to these two banks, have great limitations, and their exhibitions are often limited to their own country, and the banks labeled as kingdoms are always watched when entering other countries, and it is not easy to show casually.

The Rose Bank, on the other hand, does not have such an obvious label, because it has branches in all countries, and is willing to serve any country without presupposition, and they declare that they are only loyal to the principles and interests of the bank, and maintain absolute neutrality.

But even with such a good reputation, Andorra has a strong resistance to borrowing money.

Because in his early years, he saw many friends disappear because of loan sharks, and some became the servants of a certain master, and there were those who sold their sons and daughters and wives.

He was afraid.

This is the result of his second visit to the ancient city of Thailand. (To be continued!)

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