New Shun 1730

The two smiled at each other. They understood the mentality of the officers who came to the frontier to seek military merit.

It is really difficult for the victor to be blamed. In addition, the group of people who did this in Dashun before have been promoted now, and many people are naturally looking forward to repeating the past story.

Whether it is Du Feng or Niu Er, they are all in the window period. That is, the graduates of the first few batches of military reforms all follow the steps and do not need to provoke border provocations. Basically, they are guaranteed to be nine-turn guards before death.

This is purely catching up with the trend. When the younger brothers behind are still reading and learning to read, the officers of Dashun who have been over-trained have already filled the first, second, and even subsequent fleet captains and trainee captains.

The army caught up with Dashun's expedition to the northwest, Japan, and Southeast Asia. After these battles, one carrot and one pit, basically all are occupied.

Since they got on the car first, they naturally have to be worthy of their butts and don't cause accidents or extra chores.

Du Feng felt that since the Nibala Kingdom had been divided into 36 states like the Western Regions and had not paid tribute for a long time, it would be okay to send some people to stir up trouble. If it was done, the emperor would be very happy when he conferred titles and rewards; if it was not done, it would have nothing to do with him, who was in charge of the Indian war. The Nibala direction belonged to Niu Er, who was in charge of domestic and foreign affairs, and had nothing to do with him.

Since Niu Er had made it clear, Du Feng followed Niu Er's meaning.

After it was settled, Niu Er said, "Then let's say goodbye. I will follow Siraj back to Rajshahi. You still have some things to do here, so I wish Brother Du a title of nobility."

After that, the two shook hands and said goodbye.

A few days later, Du Feng came to Fort William. His deputy escorted Siraj back to Rajshahi with part of the troops, and a company of scattered soldiers dispatched also followed. Niu Er's status is somewhat similar to that of the prime minister of a vassal state during the era of parallel counties and kingdoms. In name, he is the envoy of Dashun to the Siraj court, but in reality, he is responsible for a series of matters such as tariffs, land reform, land inventory, and suppression of opposition.

Kolkata is the military camp area.

Although Dhaka's location is better in theory, the environment in Dhaka is really unbearable for the garrison.

Swamps and seasonal floods, the upper level also decided to use the British foundation of more than a hundred years to place the military camp in Kolkata.

The swamps here have been drained and developed, which just saves a lot of trouble.

It's nothing more than changing the name of Fort William. Fort William, as soon as you see the name, you know that it was built by the British to welcome the landing of the Dutch. Like Fort St. George, it has too strong a political flavor and must be renamed.

After Du Feng arrived at Fort William, he rested for about half a month.

The troops reveled, distributed money, consumed, prostituted, and drank.

For a time, he was famous. He paid for everything he bought, and basically paid for drinking and whoring. Those who didn't pay would be beaten by the military. Therefore, the mood after the change of rule here was quickly stabilized.

The trading houses and warehouses of the British East India Company were all closed down; the locals who worked for the East India Company were basically arrested.

The ones left near Calcutta were basically local Bengal craftsmen.

It can be said that before the British came to Bengal, it was objectively slightly more beneficial to the local area than Dashun. After all, Dashun only wanted spinners, not weavers, and the British cotton textile industry was too low and far behind India. They wanted both cloth and yarn.

It will take some time for the transformation. Dashun needs long-staple cotton, and Bengal is now planting degraded Indian cotton.

We have to wait for Niu Er to reach an agreement with the Chaidaminers in various places on the change of land ownership, wait for the Academy of Sciences to send people to try to plant cotton seeds here, and wait for large-scale long-staple cotton to be popularized before we can set up a hand-spinning mill here, continue to expand the scale of the hand-spinning industry here, and use dumping to completely eliminate the weavers here.

In the short term, Dashun was not even interested in Bengal's cotton yarn. It would only choose Bengal's cotton.

Because the Dashun capitalist embryonic area, that is, the cotton textile area centered on Song, Su, and Nantong, used a pedal iron wheel loom that could not use this short-staple cotton yarn. The iron wheel loom was a product that matched the long-staple cotton in northern Jiangsu and Nanyang.

It could not be used universally.

However, due to the large-scale entry of Dashun into Guandong, the price of cotton in recent years has been good, and the profit is good. Therefore, Bengal's cotton can definitely be bought to make fillings for cotton jackets and cotton pants.

Therefore, within a few years, cotton textile handicraftsmen around Kolkata may have to experience a cruel... fate.

Or starve to death.

Or change careers.

At least for the Kolkata area alone, they are not a self-sufficient economic system, but a purely export-oriented textile industry.

Du Feng is more familiar with this. People in the new school have basically read the classic case of Dashun going to Nanyang in the newspapers of their system.

That is, the cotton textile industry in Mumbai and Surat suffered a great disaster after Dashun went to Southeast Asia. In the Dutch markets in Southeast Asia and Persia, there was a wave of Dashun Songsu cotton cloth replacing Surat cotton cloth, which led to chaos in Surat.

In view of the endless weaver strikes and uprisings in the previous dynasty, Du Feng was still a little worried about the weaver uprisings around Kolkata.

Therefore, he was busy with surveying and mapping these days, preparing to strengthen the fortress in the future, setting up artillery positions in Diamond Bay, preparing to dig rivers to block the connection with Kolkata residential areas, and so on.

After being so busy for more than half a month, Dashun's second batch of fleets finally arrived in Kolkata.

They were transiting in Calcutta, not to support the Indian squadron.

Dashun mobilized armed merchant ships, naval transport ships and a group of cruisers to unload a group of people here and load another group of people to Europe.

The main fleet led by the seventh prince went ahead, and they were going to control the sea power in the Mediterranean.

Along the way, they would leave fast communication frigates and fast sailing ships converted from specialized anti-smuggling ships at several strategic support points of Dashun or the bases of allies to connect information from various places.

From the Mediterranean to Senegal.

Then from Senegal to the Cape of Good Hope.

Then there is Madagascar, where Swedish pirates are entrenched in the sale of stolen goods, and then there is Mauritius in France.

Relying on a method similar to the 800-mile express relay, they tried their best to learn about the situation in West Africa and Europe.

This fleet had no battleship escort, only a group of cruisers.

Their mission was to transport three of the four combat engineer battalions in Calcutta, as well as some artillery and a batch of explosives, to the Cape of Good Hope.

They may spend the winter at the Cape of Good Hope to rest, and after receiving news from Senegal, they will head north to Gibraltar.

That is an opportunity for Dashun's merchant ships to take advantage of the opportunity to insert themselves into the Mediterranean for trade. They must take it, and after taking it, they can lock in Spain's inevitable war against Britain and Portugal.

As for the Cape of Good Hope, there is no shortage of supplies. Cattle, sheep, food, and even citrus and lemons, Liu Yu had already started preparing after the Sino-Dutch South China Sea War. A few hundred people this year and fifty next year will accumulate, and supply will definitely not be a problem.

Historically, it was after the North American War of Independence that Britain realized the logistics problem of naval transportation and supply, and set up a special naval logistics bureau. The helmsman of the Dashun Navy for the century was preparing for a war thousands of miles away from the beginning. I dare not say that the logistics of transporting tens of thousands of people across the ocean at one time, and thousands of people, can still be figured out.

The people sent by this fleet to Calcutta are new students recruited by Dashun to work in the colony.

Surveying, checking the land, measuring the land, opening up plantations, etc., are also considered colonial "officials".

This also reflects Dashun's human resources advantage and low cost advantage.

As a group of people who are actually literate outside the imperial examination, they are marginal people in Dashun.

Colonial officials are not in the same system as imperial examination officials. One is managed by the civil service government, and the other is not.

And it was agreed at the beginning that the inside is inside and the outside is outside, and people in the new school system do not occupy imperial examination quotas and official vacancies.

Theoretically, if the hundreds of thousands of students who came from the imperial examination, including Dashun, are willing, they can also go to the colony as officials.

However, no one is willing to come.

Because in Dashun, as long as you pass the imperial examination, you will immediately become a local gentry, with a house, land, social status, cultural circle and money. Only fools are willing to come to the colony.

And this group of people who came from the new school are basically poor families, and they go to the kind of cheap subsidized schools. After learning to read, Dashun could use this group of people at a very low labor cost by giving them two or three taels of silver a month, some colonial subsidies, and a promotion channel within the "external" system.

After all, this group of people can write and calculate, can solve geometry and algebra, have a general education worldview, and recognize the cutting-edge theories of gravity and conservation of matter at that time, which is roughly equivalent to the diploma of the sixth grade to the second grade of junior high school in later generations.

In this era, looking around the world, such a high level of literacy, according to the European price, can run to the colonies with high fever and high mortality rates in droves, which is unique in the world.

After all, in a few years, for example, in Lancashire, 50-year-old illiterate grandmothers who spin cotton yarn will have a weekly salary of 8 shillings. Dashun can directly recruit a group of non-readers who are considered highly educated talents at that time with half the salary of textile factory workers.

After all, the real industrial revolution has not yet arrived, and Dashun cannot provide so many decent jobs that require both literacy and culture. Liu Yu has invested in charity schools over the years, and has cultivated a group of literate people who are not scholars. This is quite embarrassing. In the textile factories in Songsu, there are a lot of bonded women sent by their mothers-in-law or parents, and a large number of child laborers with flexible fingers. The wages are very low, 100 kilograms of sorghum rice a month, and there are many people rushing to do it.

These newly literate people think that it is better to come to the colonies to make a living than to go to the textile factories.

In addition to this group of people, the fleet also sent the first batch of troops stationed in India.

That is, after completing their service, they will be settled locally or sent to the colonies to open up land and grant fields. They are also recruited from refugees and disaster victims. They follow the path of the Song Dynasty and pick the young and strong among the disaster victims. The rest... the rest are weak, but they are also useful. They can be sold to human traffickers to sign bonded contracts to work.

After these soldiers come to India, they will gradually replace the professional field troops. The field troops still need to be trained in Ceylon, Temasek and other places in an organized manner.

Always maintain a fixed number of field troops with high salaries and high military pay, and will not easily increase the number of field troops. The more they are, the more they cannot afford to support, and they will eventually rot together.

In addition, the Dashun government did not allow generals to recruit Indian soldiers at all, which was also a kind of checks and balances strategy of the court. They were worried that someone would work in India for a long time and directly follow the story of Babur - I can't win at home, so I ran to India to be the emperor. I would rather be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. Isn't it wonderful? He did it in Kabul, so why can't I do it?

After the first batch of Indian troops who were trained in Dashun and brought here were handed over to Du Feng, Du Feng handed over the three combat engineer battalions that had been repaired and replenished to the navy.

The fleet completed the handover at the port of Kolkata. Before the handover, the three old things were done: combat engineers used wet towels to extinguish the fire on their hair, washed their hair and took a bath, sprayed medicine, changed clothes to kill lice, and ate dumplings or eight-treasure rice before boarding the ship.

This early lice-killing medicine was the neem tree that Dashun promoted in rural areas of northern Jiangsu to replace the Chinese tallow tree. Many years have passed, just like the immigrants in Ceylon many years ago, it has also reached the time to bear fruit.

The oil extracted from the seeds is used as lice head oil. It is one of the few lice-killing medicines that generally do not kill people at this time, and it is also an important export material of Dashun. Oriental medicinal head oil was very popular in Europe as soon as it came out, especially among Eastern European hussars, but the previous profits were earned by middlemen, and Dashun's merchant ships could not enter the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

The Dashun side is mainly for military use, especially as an important material for long-distance combat in the logistics department. After all, compared with lead bullets, typhus, relapsing fever and other diseases, the combat effectiveness is much stronger.

Although the body and hair are inherited from parents, Dashun soldiers have no resistance to burning hair and washing hair. At least, compared with the several disturbances caused by the naval regulations that bodies are thrown into the sea and ballast sand is not allowed to be brought back to the shore to bury the bodies, this matter is not stagnant.

These people living in the barracks are really afraid of being bitten by lice.

Of course, it will take some time before the emergence of stuffy factories and steam engines pulling scalps and heads and the popularization of short hair. But after all, this is the natural self-evolution of cultural customs in the steam age. In other words, it is a kind of universal necessity in the steam age, that is, some imperialist awakeners in Dashun are thinking about disguising the universal choice of the times as a cultural symbol of the nation.

But before the output of this cultural symbol, Dashun’s army set out on the journey to Europe earlier than Dashun’s steam engine.

They had to shed enough blood to win a long-term right of passage in the Mediterranean for Dashun's industrial and commercial capital. After all, that was the Gibraltar Fortress that Britain had operated for fifty years, and it was not comparable to India, where a total of three thousand European-style new troops, half of which were Bengal native soldiers, could be gathered.

At this time, the combat engineers who had just experienced an easy victory did not know where they would go to fight, but only knew that they would have to continue fighting. But with the help of India's two sieges, they were full of confidence and a sense of ease in the future battles.