I want to be emperor

Chapter 703 Labor Dispatch of Toyo Trading Company

The exploration of the Americas by the Great Chu Empire started very early, but the efficiency of this early exploration was very low.

Because going east is a vast sea with few islands.

Although sailing ships can theoretically sail as long as they are not damaged, the fresh water and food reserves on board are limited, which means that the time the crew can stay on board is also limited.

If you can't find the island for food and fresh water supply for a long time, the end will be very sad.

Therefore, the early exploration of the Americas by the Great Chu Empire was a continuous exploration of the route for many years. Islands as a base to continue sailing east.

It was through bumps and bumps along the way that they found a route to North America, and finally landed in North America, probably in the San Francisco area of ​​later generations.

On the way, they also discovered and controlled the Sandalwood Islands, because a large area of ​​precious sandalwood wood was found on this island, which made the Dongyang Trading Company, which had been investing all the time, get a little return.

After landing in the San Francisco area, they began to trade with the local aborigines. After obtaining a large amount of fur, gold, gemstones and other materials from the aborigines, the most important thing was the discovery of gold mines in the San Francisco area. The Toyo Trading Company relied on the local gold mines. It is the period of profit.

Then it was able to continue to carry out colonial activities, opened up more than a dozen colonial strongholds along the coastline, and began to organize immigration.

Up to now, the Great Chu Empire has established two large-scale colonial settlements in North America. The first is San Francisco and the second is the Seattle area. In addition, there are several small colonies mainly based on supply and trade bases. The total local population is about [-] people, and more than half of them are sailors or armed employees of the Toyo Trading Company, and trade personnel.

The other half are official immigrants!

As for free immigration, there is none for the time being!

After all, the Americas are still very unfamiliar to the Great Chu Empire. At the same time, the distance is too far away. It takes several months for a single voyage. The voyage is long and risky. More importantly, people are too unfamiliar with this place.

People are always wary of unfamiliar places.

So for the time being, only officially organized migrants will run across.

Because of the distance, people are not familiar with the Americas, and the aborigines in North America are quite vigorous... The aborigines in this place are not farming aborigines, but mostly hunting people.

Herding and hunting are the main ways of survival, and the existing organizational structure is not a country, but a tribe.

This kind of hunting people is not easy to deal with!
These have led to the emigration of the Great Chu Empire in North America not going smoothly.

But... the current North America is a pretty good dumping place for industrial goods!
There are many aboriginals in North America today, and these aboriginal tribes are also full of conflicts and wars often occur, which means that these places have a huge demand for weapons.

No guns are needed, even cold weapons can be sold at a very good price in these places.

And there is no need to worry about the payment ability of these local indigenous people. These hunting tribes have a lot of animal fur on hand, especially cowhide.

The Great Chu Empire basically refused all kinds of animal fur, and the more the better.

In addition, it can also be paid by hiring local labor to help the Great Chu Empire mine... Dongyang Trading Company has discovered gold mines in the San Francisco area, but there is a serious shortage of mining labor. In order to solve the labor problem, it has reached an agreement with several nearby tribes Labor dispatch agreement...

According to the labor dispatch agreement signed by the Toyo Trading Company and the tribe, the indigenous tribes organize their own labor to mine, and the Toyo Trading Company pays according to the amount of minerals dug out (usually various industrial commodities, especially weapons).

As for how the indigenous tribes squeezed the labor force and where the labor force came from during the mining process, Toyo Trading Company didn't care about it. That was the problem of the indigenous tribes themselves.

The reason why this labor dispatch system is established is because the laws of the Great Chu Empire clearly prohibit slavery... In order to avoid violating domestic laws, many companies or individuals who go overseas generally do not directly buy or use slaves or slave labor And so on, they often adopt the labor dispatch model.

Others also engage in entrusted mining and planting models, which are actually similar to labor dispatching, except that the name is different and the procedures are somewhat different, but in essence, it is to avoid violating the Great Chu Empire’s own laws prohibiting slavery, and at the same time want to use Obtain labor at the lowest cost to mine minerals and engage in various plantations.

Through this mode of labor dispatch and commissioned production, these commercial companies or individuals can avoid violating the slavery laws of the Great Chu Empire.

Because from the legal point of view of the Great Chu Empire, Dongyang Trading Company has nothing to do with these workers. Dongyang Trading Company has only reached a labor dispatch agreement with a certain tribe. How to do it is the business of these tribes themselves. Toyo Trading Company has nothing to do.

Dongyang Trading Company only pays a certain amount of remuneration according to the quantity of minerals produced.

Relying on the labor dispatch model, Toyo Trading Company has opened many gold and silver mines in the Americas. At the same time, it also organized and opened many wheat plantations in the Seattle area, and opened several watering plantations in the San Francisco area. The food meets the local food needs of the colony.

Moreover, since the local labor dispatch system was established, the local indigenous tribes have become more fond of fighting with each other in order to obtain more free labor so that they can be dispatched to work.

Therefore, the sales of various weapons of Toyo Trading Company in North America have also increased significantly.

It was this series of measures that allowed the Toyo Trading Company to temporarily stabilize its foothold in North America, and had the funds and ability to continue organizing immigration and building various immigrant settlements.

The last thing is to go to the interior of North America and dump industrial commodities on a large scale.

When the Great Chu Empire came to North America, it was to open up the market in the early stage. As for the development of large-scale immigration, that was all in the later stage.

Of course, not any place can become a dumping ground for the industrial goods of the Great Chu Empire, if you want to become a dumping ground for the industrial goods of the Great Chu Empire.

First of all, the local area must have a certain degree of civilization. There is a large demand for cloth, iron products, weapons and equipment, and at the same time, the ability to pay.

This ability to pay can be the industrial raw materials needed by the Great Chu Empire, such as high-quality cotton from the Indian Peninsula region, sulfur from the Fusang region, or some local specialties, such as spices, precious wood, sea pearls, and tropical economic crops from the Nanyang region. , some animal fur from other places, etc.

Of course, it can also be the most simple and direct gold and silver, such as the large-scale trade between the Spaniards and the Great Chu Empire, Spain used gold and silver to pay.

Therefore, the Nanyang region, the Indian Peninsula region, the Fuso region, and even West Asia, North Africa, and Europe are very good dumping grounds for industrial commodities.

In North America, the local civilization is too low, and besides animal fur, the local indigenous tribes also lack sufficient payment capacity... Of course, the indigenous force value in this place is not low, most of them are nomadic This kind of nomadic people was actually very incomprehensible to the early colonists... These natives were too mobile and had no fixed place to live. For the colonists who relied on colonial strongholds and had limited activities Difficult to deal with.

This is why the Indians in North America were able to live until the nineteenth century...Because after the nineteenth century, the advancement of trains and ships, coupled with gun technology, enabled colonists to easily deal with nomads.

In general, it is similar to the fact that many ethnic groups in East Asia have become good at singing and dancing after modern times... All nomadic peoples have to become good at singing and dancing in front of machine guns... Those who cannot dance and sing will die.

As for things like gold, silver and precious stones, those indigenous tribes also lack the ability to mine minerals on a large scale.

So in history, after European colonists went to places like America and Africa, they found that the local trade was not profitable, so they adopted another way to obtain benefits, that is, to set up plantations of various economic crops, and to mine gold on a large scale. silver.

To put it in simpler and more straightforward words: squeeze the value of labor!
Other methods are not easy to do, but the labor force can always be squeezed, which is why the indigenous population in the Americas, especially in the areas controlled by Spain and Portugal, decreased rapidly in a very short period of time during European colonization.

The foreign smallpox virus is just a trivial matter. The real reason is the labor squeeze, and it is a very short-sighted squeeze, so that the local indigenous people are rapidly extinct, and finally have to import labor from Africa to maintain the operation of the plantations.

This led to today's delta trade, that is, the slave trade. European merchant ships transported various commodities from Europe to the west coast of Africa, exchanged slaves from local tribal leaders or simply slave traders, and then shipped them to the Americas, mainly controlled by Spain or Portugal. Brazil and Mexico were sold to local colonial plantations, and the plantations used these slaves to grow tobacco and other economic crops, and then sold them to these European merchant ships, and finally the merchant ships carried American tobacco and other crops back to Europe for sale.

As a result, a closed trade loop is formed.

This is the delta trade.

However, what the Spaniards and Portuguese did was not easy to do in the Great Chu Empire, because the Great Chu Empire banned slaves.

As long as it is in the control area of ​​the Great Chu Empire, it does not matter whether it is a local or an overseas colony, and the slaves do not matter whether they are nationals or aboriginals.

Slavery is completely prohibited in the Great Chu Empire.

However, in order to obtain indigenous labor resources, the Western Trading Company and the Eastern Trading Company, the two armed trading companies, have adopted the labor dispatch or commissioned production model, and the effect is quite good.

The main business of the Toyo Trading Company in the Americas, in addition to conducting various forms of trade with local indigenous people and actively developing the local area, trade with the Spaniards in Mexico is also a major business.

The scale of trade between the Great Chu Empire and Spain is very large. In the early years, the Spaniards themselves went to the Luzon Islands to trade with the Great Chu Empire.

Later, the Eastern Trading Company of the Great Chu Empire took the initiative to transport the goods to Mexico and sell them to the Spaniards.

This trade route also allowed the Oriental Trading Company to obtain a large amount of profits, further maintaining the colonial activities in North America.

The above are the results of the colonial expansion of the Great Chu Empire in North America over the past few years, with the Oriental Trading Company as the main body.

It doesn’t matter how big the results are. At most, they opened up two relatively large colonial settlements in Seattle and San Francisco, plus a dozen small coastal trade and supply points. Counting it, it is on the scale of ten thousand people.

However, this still laid a solid foundation for the colonial expansion of the Great Chu Empire in North America.

At least with the tens of thousands of immigrants or armed employees in the early stage, and the grain plantations in Seattle and San Francisco, it will not be so troublesome for the follow-up organization to immigrate.

When organizing immigration in the early stage, it was not only necessary to transport immigrants, but also to transport a large amount of rations. Otherwise, it would be difficult for immigrants to survive in North America on a large scale.

Now, even if thousands of people are transported there every year, the local food output can meet the demand. If it is not enough, the big deal is to find the Spaniards in Mexico next door to buy some food.

These laid the foundation for the large-scale immigration of the Great Chu Empire in the Americas, and it was also the early stage of the decision of the top leaders of the Great Chu Empire to start large-scale colonization in the Americas.

At the end of December in the 23rd year of Chengshun, when the Spring Festival was approaching, the Council of the Great Chu Empire formally approved the resolution of Dongyang Trading Company to recruit and establish six colonial mixed battalions.

According to the relevant rules of the establishment of the Eastern Trading Company and the Western Trading Company by the Great Chu Empire in the past, these two armed trading companies have the power to organize overseas troops, but they need to obtain the approval of the empire.

It's not that they can organize as many colonial troops as they want.

At the same time, it is also stipulated that all armed employees of the two major armed trading companies, whether they are soldiers, officers, or generals, must be retired soldiers and must not be recruited from ordinary youths.

To put it bluntly, the company armies of the two major armed trading companies are also non-staff troops under the official jurisdiction of the Great Chu Empire. The difference from the regular army lies in the source of military expenses...

The military expenditure of the regular army comes directly from financial appropriations, while the military expenditure of the company army comes from the company's operating profits.

To some extent, the reason for the existence of the two armed trading companies is actually to feed tens of thousands of colonial troops.

The establishment of the six colonial mixed battalions directly announced the beginning of the Great Chu Empire’s colonial expansion in North America.

In just one month, the six colonial mixed battalions were already on board the ships of the Toyo Trading Company, first preparing to go to Fusang, and then taking the North Pacific route to Seattle through Fusang.

It is worth noting that these six colonial mixed battalions were all active-duty troops of the Army a month ago, from soldiers to officers without exception...

Because the Great Chu Empire directly transferred six infantry battalions, plus more than 8000 active-duty troops such as Ruo's army sentries, cavalry sentries, and heavy-duty sentries, to the reserve service collectively...and then replaced it with a colonial hybrid of the Toyo Trading Company. After receiving the title of the battalion, he was transferred directly to North America.

In order to reassure these soldiers transferred to the reserve, especially those officers, the empire also has a complete set of handling methods.

The first is the salary and treatment. In addition to the original basis, generous overseas subsidies are added. In short, the salary will not be low. At the same time, when fighting overseas, the regulations on the distribution of various spoils are also very generous.

Many soldiers who went to serve in the colonies came back with big bags and small bags when they returned home, full of greasy food.

So going to serve in the colonies, suffering is suffering, the danger is really dangerous, but the benefits are really great benefits,

The most important thing is the arrangement of military status. Although these people have been transferred to the reserve service, after returning to China after finishing this North American dispatch mission, the military will recruit them in the name of recruiting retired soldiers, so as to resume active service identity.

Then carry out a series of follow-up processing in the capacity of active duty, the retirement transfer of the retirement transfer, the promotion of the promotion, and the transfer of the transfer.

At the same time, during the period of service in the colony, the military exploits, promotions, and length of service obtained are also regarded as the military exploits, promotions, and length of service in the regular army.

In short... except for the different names and different sources of military expenditure.

The overall pattern of these six colonial mixed battalions is no different from that of the troops sent overseas by the regular army to serve overseas. Even the command power is actually in the hands of the military... According to the relevant laws and regulations of the two major armed trading companies It is clearly stipulated that the military has the right to direct their armed employees in peacetime and to command in time of war.

And the senior management in charge of armed employees in Dongyang Trading Company is all military reserve generals.

It's not just the six new mixed battalions of the Toyo Trading Company. All the armed employees of the previous two armed trading companies basically follow this model.

Otherwise, the upper echelon of the empire would be assured that some trading company would employ tens of thousands of armed employees!

Military power will always be the highest level of the empire, and Luo Zhixue is most concerned about it.

And following the six colonial mixed battalions to North America, there was also Huang Jingheng, the first North American governor of the Great Chu Empire, who was different from a group of people from the Dongyang Trading Company who were full of hope. After Huang Jingheng boarded the ship, it was Keeping a gloomy face all the time, while looking at the shore for a long time...

When the steam engine started, the sails were raised, and the ship gradually moved away from the coastline, he still stood on the deck and looked at the gradually receding shore, his fingers gripping the railing so hard that they turned white.

Although he was defeated and demoted this time, sooner or later, he will come back!
In the past, he was one of the important candidates for the governor of a certain province in Guanzhong, but he lost the competition and was caught by his competitors. In the end, he had to choose between becoming an official or going overseas.

The reason why he didn't simply choose to retire like many high-ranking officials who failed in the struggle, but went to work overseas in a place where the birds don't shit, is because Huang Jingheng is not reconciled!
He wants to persevere, he wants to return to the Central Plains, he... wants revenge!

After waiting until he could no longer see the pier on the shore, Huang Jingheng turned around and returned to the cabin, and called his subordinates and staff to discuss matters.

If you want to return to the Central Plains, and want to take revenge in an important position after returning, then the governor of North America must do a good job, especially to satisfy His Majesty...

(End of this chapter)