New Shun 1730

In the era of the Industrial Revolution, a lot of things can change in 20 to 30 years. Especially after Dashun used warships to gain commercial hegemony, this was even more true for India.

In fact, the story of India, cotton, and Britain in history can be thought of with a very simple thought experiment.

For example, before the Ming Dynasty, why didn't people plant sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes when they were used to save famine?

Because there were none.

So, why did sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes quickly become the first food crops for disaster relief and famine prevention in some places as soon as they appeared?

Because the yield is large and the solar terms are not so strict.

In short, it is better than other famine relief things before.

Cotton textiles are actually somewhat similar to this.

You know, in the early years, Britain was the largest country in the woolen textile industry. The enclosure movement can even be said to be centered around the woolen textile industry.

So, why did Britain spin woolen cloth in the early years of history?

Because there was no cotton.

Then why did cotton cloth develop as soon as it appeared?

Obviously, because Indian cotton cloth set an example, no matter in terms of quality, comfort, dyeing level, etc., British linen and woolen cloth could not fight back.

Therefore, it is precisely because Indian cotton cloth is of better quality and the productivity level of cotton textile industry is higher that it amazed Europe as soon as it appeared, so it caused a series of subsequent problems.

Otherwise, why did they switch to cotton when they were good at rubbing wool? The historical inertia is so great, and it is obviously enough to reverse this historical inertia.

To a certain extent, twenty years ago, India and China were the only ones and leaders in cotton textile handicraft industry. The rest are all behind - the "cloth of sorrow" in the West African slave trade was Indian cloth in history.

In this case, the problem of India is complicated.

There are only two ways to destroy a country's production capacity.

One: dumping of high-quality and low-priced products with generation gap.

Two: rule and destroy by administrative means.

[The invasion and rule of the colonists directly led to the rapid decline and collapse of India's once prosperous cotton textile export trade]

In fact, this is a question that goes back to the Opium War.

Why did we have to fight the Opium War?

Because Britain had a trade deficit.

So, if we liberalize tariffs and stop the opium trade, will Britain have a trade surplus?

This... I can only say that Britain itself does not believe it. The people of the East India Company are like mirrors in their hearts.

So it is still the question that Liu Yu mentioned before. On the basis of not considering the anti-human crime of opium, how can Britain achieve a trade surplus with China in 1840?

Answer: Only by being more anti-human.

Occupy the capital, rule directly, restore the Mongolian yurt tax system, release the gentry's power at the grassroots level, pull up the Yellow River, blow up the canal, completely destroy China's farmland water conservancy facilities, and completely salinize the Huanghuai Plain...

Through more anti-human rule, the productivity here will be completely regressed.

Otherwise, Britain in 1840 would never have achieved a trade surplus.

There is a concept that is easily confused here.

Productivity and production capacity are not the same thing.

The productivity in the context of Lao Ma does not include production relations.

Steel said: [The production tools used to produce material materials, and people with certain production experience and labor skills to use production tools and realize material production - all these factors together constitute the social productivity]

Lao Ma said: [The most important fruit of civilization - the productivity that has been obtained]

Therefore, it can be said that the result of colonial rule is the regression of local productivity - what Britain did in India was to destroy India's water conservancy projects, starve hundreds of millions of people in India, and destroy India's certain production experience and labor skills to use production tools and realize material production.

Lao Ma once criticized Proudhon, saying [Mr. Proudhon believes that any economic category has both good and bad aspects. He looks at categories like petty bourgeoisie looks at historical greats: Napoleon is a great man; he did a lot of good, but also did a lot of evil]

[Mr. Proudhon believes that the good and bad aspects, the benefits and harms together constitute the inherent contradictions of each economic category]

[So the problem that should be solved is: preserve the good aspects and eliminate the bad aspects]

This statement is the same for Dashun at this time.

Perhaps, some people would think, can we beautify this bloody period of primitive accumulation? Distinguish between good and bad, only take the good aspects and not the bad aspects?

Take a Dashun-style, unique, less dark and bloody colonial path?

I am afraid that it is obviously not possible.

Because, in fact, Dashun is no longer a traditional empire, but a standard modern empire.

If it is still a traditional empire, then it doesn’t matter.

You Aryans can rule India, you Mongols can rule India, and I Dashun can naturally rule India.

It does not involve the adjustment of productivity and production relations, and it is natural to rule as usual, collect some taxes, repair water conservancy, and maintain the original system.

But now Dashun is obviously no longer a traditional empire.

Indeed, when Liu Yu deceived the emperor to go south, he deceived him with the idea of ​​a traditional empire. In other words, he was wearing the cloak of a traditional empire and did what modern imperialism should do: what he told the old emperor at the time was the head tax and acreage tax in India.

But obviously, now, the rule in India is serving Dashun’s capital.

Including taxation, it is a tool used to destroy India's "achievement of civilization", that is, its existing productivity. For example, export taxes, internal tolls, production stamp duties, internal banknotes, etc. are levied on Indian cotton cloth. As for Indian cotton yarn and raw cotton, low-tax policies are adopted as much as possible, and they are even plundered by commercial capital. .

Over the past twenty or thirty years, a drastic change has quietly taken place in Dashun and India.

The cotton planting industry within Dashun is basically not good in small farmer planting areas. Most areas in Dashun, whether they are pioneer areas or inland protected areas, are essentially using Indian raw cotton and Indian cotton yarn.

Likewise.

Twenty or thirty years ago, India, which was still the "runner-up" in the world's cotton textile industry, had its cotton export industry completely crushed by Dashun.

Once the runner-up in the world's cotton textile industry, now the word textile only means spinning, not weaving.

A brutal transformation has already occurred.

Now, it is obvious that Dashun is about to experience it a second time: Dashun now doesn’t even want cotton yarn from India, but only wants raw cotton from India.

This process cannot be explained simply by the extremely general explanation of "advanced productivity defeats backward productivity".

On the contrary, this kind of defeat and forced transformation, if there is a total of ten powers.

The rumbling sound of machinery in Dashun's cotton textile factory accounts for at most two points.

The remaining eight points were obtained by relying on warships, bayonets, cannons, soldiers, tax collectors, the centralization ability of the court, the organizational ability of social forces, etc.

And, the whole process was quite cruel.

Because Dashun is anxious, very anxious.

In historical Britain, in the mid-18th century, British commercial capital and budding industrial capital were in opposition to each other in terms of Eastern trade. The iconic product of this opposition was the cotton ban.

On Dashun's side, Dashun's commercial capital and budding industrial capital are not opposed to India. On the contrary, their interests are consistent: this is a carnival with more people participating, and industrial capital wants to Cheap cotton yarn needs a market; commercial capital wants to plunder profits; even some handicraftsmen in Dashun also benefit from Indian cotton yarn.

Therefore, Dashun is very anxious in India.

It should be said that Dashun has completed the century-long journey of Britain from 1757 to 1857 in the past 20 to 30 years. For Britain, these 100 years mean that the level of cotton textile industry has never been as good as that of India and India. to equaling India, and then to surpassing India; and for Dashun, there is no stage that is inferior to India, nor is there a stage of equaling India, so Dashun goes up to the stage of surpassing India.

Twenty or thirty years.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, was once a handicraft-based city comparable to London and Paris. The population dropped sharply from 180,000 to 30,000.

The capital of the Jiashi Kingdom recorded in the "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" is: "The capital city of the country is adjacent to the Suga River in the west, and is eighteen or nineteen miles long and five or six miles wide. Lu Yanjubi lived in the prosperous Yin Dynasty, his family accumulated tens of thousands, and his room was full of rare goods. He is gentle and courteous in nature, emphasizes secularism and emphasizes learning. He believes more in heretics and less in Buddhism. The weather was harmonious, the crops were flourishing, the fruit trees were sparse, and the grass was lush. In just twenty or thirty years, the city was filled with unemployed craftsmen.

This is the background of handicraft industry.

In agriculture, Dashun also made a huge mistake!

That is, Dashun tried to copy the Dashun land system to India in some occupied areas, especially in the interior areas.

The land system in Dashun has huge "flaws": property rights are clear and can be bought and sold.

This flaw will of course cause problems.

That is, Dashun's capital and India's loan sharks began to desperately acquire land.

It's not that this thing is bad.

Rather, the UK has a population of 9 million and can produce 130,000 troops and 50,000 to 60,000 Hessian mercenaries. There is also North America next to it to relieve pressure, plus the industry and commerce brought by maritime hegemony, so there is no problem with the enclosure.

This is not the case in India. Furthermore, the fact that private ownership of land can be bought and sold in Dashun means that a "correct" social consciousness has been formed.

It is also said that Dashun's plundering, taxation and other issues in India have caused small real estate ownership to rapidly move towards mergers.

This is an agricultural issue.

There are also issues of feudal tribes and soldiers.

Dashun is neither Britain nor France.

Dashun does not want Indian soldiers.

There is no need for Indians to serve as soldiers. At best, they can serve as auxiliary soldiers, but it is also a recruiting system.

In this matter, it can be said that Dashun's governance is "childish".

But this is also determined by the reality of Dashun: there is a large population, and India is alone overseas. Let the Indian Governor recruit troops in India? Isn't this nonsense? Besides, soldiers are paid monthly, and there are so many landless people in Dashun. If these people cannot survive at home and want to rebel, it is better to send them to India to serve as soldiers.

It's not that the simple rulers of Dashun can't turn this corner, but they also have two thousand years of border control skills.

Rather, given the reality of the situation, one-third, perhaps even nearly two-fifths, of the world’s population is allowed to go to India to recruit troops? This is a brain disease.

In itself, part of the reason for the great Indian national uprising in history was that the British wanted to change the military system. Some Indian soldiers were unhappy: I have made a living as a soldier since ancient times. If you let those castes serve as soldiers, what should we do?

Therefore, it is easy to understand that Dashun's rule in India was, in essence,... a suicide attempt.

India did not originally have a large number of landless peasants in the sense of Dashun, because the land system was different.

How could there be landless peasants if there was no land in the first place?

Dashun created some landless peasants in some areas.

When Niu Er and others investigated in Bengal, they proposed a strategy of directly creating a large number of medium-sized landlords in one step. They said that if they copied the land system of Dashun, they would have to merge sooner or later, so why bother taking off their pants to fart?

However, on the one hand, this system is more suitable for areas with convenient transportation and transformation into plantations.

In some inland areas, Dashun mainly relied on taxation, and the situation was complicated, so they chose a land system closer to Dashun for the convenience of taxation.

Of course, this matter, what can I say?

Land can be bought and sold, and the property rights are clear, so for businessmen, usurers, and local officials, buying and hoarding land is the highest rate of return.

Those messy land systems are troublesome, but they have achieved a stable and compromised state in the continuous struggle for thousands of years.

Is Dashun's land system not advanced? In the 18th century, if you say this thing is not advanced, then you can only say that it is a radical fantasy that thinks we should jump to an ideal society in one step.

The problem is that it is "too" advanced. This kind of advancement was achieved in France by the storm of 1993, which requires a dual revolution of social existence and social consciousness. Moreover, as Marx said in The Eighteenth Brumaire, this kind of thing is initially beneficial, but it will be pushed into the bloody mill of capital in a few years.

So much so that under the rule of Dashun, India actually saw a scene that had hardly appeared before: the landless peasants revolted, killed the usurers and the landlords.

Under this ownership system, it is natural to pay back debts. The small farmers' little land was sucked up by usurers, merchants, and officials, and they had to owe a lot of debts. Then don't you have to use the land to pay back the money? Is there anything else?

Historically, Britain tried to implement a similar land system in India, but the result was [no class hated us as much as the landless peasants... At first they released their anger on the usurers, but soon they were ruled by us]

The Dashun side, on the other hand, dragged India into the "lending, annexation, and uprising" routine that the Dashun side had experienced.

The peasant problem is a big problem.

The handicraftsmen are also a big problem.

Then are the conflicts between Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. a small problem?

Is the caste system a small problem?

These problems are not unsolvable, Dashun can do it slowly.

To be a traditional empire, that is to seize the crown of the Mughal. If you Mongolians can be the emperor of India, I can do it too. Everything remains unchanged, just collect some taxes.

But since it is not a traditional empire, and Dashun's productivity is here, there has never been a stage where "the textile industry is not as good as India" from the beginning.

The domestic industrial capital is crying out for food, and urgently needs India's cotton, jute, rice, dyes, and markets.

The imperial court was engaged in large-scale infrastructure construction in the country and urgently needed India's tax revenue.

The capitalist production system urgently needed to "transform India according to the needs of capitalism."

Urgent, urgent, urgent.

The result of the urgency was that the landless peasants, unemployed handicraftsmen, traditional feudal soldiers, caste soldiers, religion... and the Indian bourgeoisie cultivated by Dashun in the past 20 to 30 years - the national industrial bourgeoisie engaged in buying and spinning cotton yarn in handicraft workshops - were also dissatisfied.

But these dissatisfactions had their own corresponding interest groups on the Dashun side.

Dashun could not solve the demands of the landless peasants in India. This was in the interests of Dashun's financial capital, land speculators, money lenders, and colonial officials of the practical school.

Should they make concessions?

Dashun could not solve the demands of handicraftsmen. This was in the interests of Dashun's industrial capital, shipping industry, financial capital, plantation owners, and coal and iron consortiums.

This could not be touched.

Religion, this is a cultural conflict, which is almost unsolvable, needless to say.

The demands of feudal soldiers and local caste soldiers are even more difficult for Dashun to resolve.

This is because Dashun does not trust Indian soldiers - Dashun is not without ethnic soldiers from the border, such as Fusang's forest light infantry, but they will never be allowed to serve in their hometowns.

Another reason is the pressure from "potential rebels" on Dashun's side - serving in India is at least a way to survive. Once there is a famine, disaster relief will be needed anyway, and India will also have to pay salaries. These two things combined will save money.

This is even more untouchable.

What about the demands of the old feudal lords in India? This is even more needless to say.

What about the demands of the budding industrial capitalists in India? This is still unsolvable. The industrial capital on Dashun's side wants to take away the surplus value of the labor process of turning cotton into cotton yarn. Moreover, Dashun also urgently needs to solve the employment problem.

One problem after another, all unsolvable.

Or, it is not that there is no solution, but that the real basis of Li Xi's rule has changed at this time. The interests in India must be consistent with the interests of those who support his throne.

For example, the financial capital that lends money: Damn, you don't let me go to the mainland to grab land and hoard land, so I can't merge in India? Then you don't let me lend and merge in India, okay, then you let me merge in Henan, Hubei, Shaanxi and other places?

We supported you at the beginning because you promised us that we could find a way to make money without merging in the mainland.

It is not because we have brains and rationally know that the external gold and silver rushing to the interior to annex land will cause a great uprising and hang us all on the trees.

As a whole, we don’t have this brain at all.

We are just greedy and bloody desires for gold and silver, which are temporarily satisfied by you in India, Southeast Asia, Fusang and other places.

Then your small real estate ownership in India is not convenient for us to exploit?

To a certain extent, Dashun did complete the historical British century from 1757 to 1857 in 30 years: plantations, cotton, indigo, railways, rice, taxation, cotton yarn, tariffs, land system...

But as Lao Ma commented on Proudhon: [The good and bad aspects, the benefits and harms together constitute the inherent contradictions of each economic category... So the problem that should be solved is: preserve the good aspects and eliminate the bad aspects...] This is obviously a fantasy.

So, Dashun also took only 30 years to force out a brewing period for a large Indian uprising that is likely to be unprecedented in scale.

Of course, it is still early, and it is just sporadic.

And such sporadic problems will only grow slowly.

Because Indian cotton is also European cotton cloth. Due to the suppression of Dashun, the cotton planting industry in the southern states of North America developed very slowly and could not get started at all: as soon as it started, Dashun would crush it with Indian cotton.

The plantation owners are not welfare workers, nor are they people who worry about the country and the people: we run plantations to make money. If cotton planting does not make money, but loses money, then why should I plant cotton?

Isn't it good to let slaves grow tobacco, dyes, sugarcane, grains, etc.? No matter how capable Dashun is, it can't crush Caribbean sugar with Nanyang sugar; it can't crush Connecticut wheat with Yezo wheat, right?

And the cotton textile industry in Europe can't be developed again.

The cotton textile industry in Lancashire, England, was directly crushed by Dashun's participation in World War I when it was still in its infancy. Britain bet its future on woolen cloth, but the same old saying still applies:

Woolen cloth is a textile industry that is easy to start but difficult to improve. When it started, it was possible to set up a wool combing factory with 700 to 800 people, and there were even early uprisings by wool combers. But the difficulty of industrialization is still to come.

Cotton, on the other hand, is an industry that is difficult to start, but takes off directly once the Ren and Du meridians are opened. In the early days, cotton seeds could only be peeled by hand, threads were twisted by hand, and the threads had to be sizing. Once the cotton seed fiber length was qualified and the spinning machine appeared, this difficulty was overcome and the road ahead was smooth.

So, under this system, Indian raw materials, Dashun processed goods, and Europe relied on the consumption of American gold and silver accumulated over hundreds of years, any problem on either side was not a trivial matter.

There was no way, gold and silver were the world's currency, and Europe had dug up mountains of gold and silver, and these things were not printed out, and this was the system now. Before Liu Yu's reform, the basic purchasing power of Dashun silver was about three times that of Europe, and the same one tael of silver really had an "exchange rate" between Dashun and Europe.

The gold and silver reserves in Europe are staggering, so this system can only last for more than 20 years. But it will soon be over.