Xinshun 1730

Chapter 950 Nightmare
Dutch smugglers are right to worry.

The direct flight of Dashun Western Trading Co., coupled with the opium case incident, will indeed lead to thinking about the tea tax issue on the British side.

However, the gap between reason and reality is often huge.

Not as the Dutch smugglers had suspected.

This time, the direct flight of the Western Trading Company and the opium case did have an impact on Britain.

But the direction of the impact is more on the emotional, political, and spiritual levels of the macro.

As for the more realistic tariff issue, the UK has not immediately resolved it.

The British government is busy with other things.

With the signing of the "Aachen Peace Treaty", the war of Austrian succession that had lasted for many years came to an end.

King George II of England ordered the composer George Friedrich Handel, who had returned to London in protest of the Dutch betrayal of the alliance, to create the "Firework Music" suite, and held a grand celebration in Green Park.

During the celebration, the huge pillars collapsed, which buried a layer of darkness in advance for this "celebration" that had already made the people dissatisfied.

Fireworks displays are only held on a small scale in London.

The forces of the "patriots" headed by the Prince of Wales also began to fan the flames.

The whole of Britain is asking, is the king the elector of Shinra, or the monarch of England?

People are asking why to celebrate.

Ask what the War of Austrian Succession brought to Britain?
Why is it worth celebrating?

Prussia gets Silesia.

The Habsburgs kept the crown.

Spain got Parma.

France completes the neutrality of the Netherlands.

Russia got the grant.

Dashun got Southeast Asia and started cooperation with the Netherlands.

Even Poland got £10,000+ for renting out soldiers.

What did Britain get?Is it worth celebrating?
Saved Hannover?

But what does Hanover have to do with the British?

England, Scotland, and Ireland are still clearly separated, and Hanover, which is far inside the European mainland, has become an indelible thorn between the British people and the king.

Wars cost money.

Aiding Austria and subsidizing Russia also cost money.

But the money was not spent on the king's internal money.

The king's eldest son, the first in line heir, and the Prince of Wales have already gathered a large group of politicians who oppose the current king.

The war of succession to the Austrian throne ended in this way, and the most urgent task that the king had to face now was not the issue of trade with China, but the dispute with his own son.

The son of the world has become its momentum.

The war, military expenses, war aid paid to the Habsburg family, the emergency national debt borne by the East India Company before the war... Now that the war is over, Dashun's cargo ships have also sailed to the English Channel.

But what can Britain, which has just ended the war, do?

Could it be that he chose to go to war in advance, taking advantage of Dashun's unstable foothold in Europe, and pushing it back?
But wars cost money.

The only East India Company that can buy emergency national debt is against it, because it means that their trade in India and China will be strangled by China.

Dutch financial capital, which likes to buy British government bonds the most, has just experienced the stock market crash in Amsterdam, and then lent a large amount of capital to the Shunzhi Huai Water Conservancy Bond, which has 2% higher interest than the UK.

The extra 2% interest is enough to make the Dutch forget the traditional friendship between Britain and the Netherlands.

The remaining capital either flocked to the auction of Chinese goods in the seven provinces, or to the smuggling syndicate, or to the shares reserved in the Netherlands of the Dashun Western Trading Company.

Relying on the extreme poverty of the domestic people, the per capita income ridiculed by Europe, and the extremely high return on investment, Dashun sucked most of the surplus money from the financial market.

This era is not the era of money printing machines, but the era of precious metals.

There is only so much money in the financial market.

Dashun takes one point, and Britain loses one point.

If you can't raise the national debt, you can only rely on tax increases.

However, in the current situation, when the fireworks show is ridiculed by the British people and various political commentators to the point where it ends right after the beginning, how can we increase taxes?

If taxes cannot be increased, how can the tea tax, which is an important source of revenue for the government, be abolished?
Britain has no shortage of politicians and economists.

Even the issue of tea tax does not require multi-disciplinary economists to understand: tariffs do not necessarily bring about smuggling, but the fucking highest tariff of 220% will definitely lead to smuggling.

The high tea tax harms the interests of the British people, but it is the smugglers outside who are fat.

however.

Reason is reason.

Reality is reality.

The reality is that no one who is the prime minister or the finance minister can cancel the tea tax and the government's important fiscal revenue at this time.

Anyone with a discerning eye knows that nothing has been resolved in this war that has just ended.

This is not peace, but a truce of unknown duration.

The trade issue between Britain and Spain, the colonial issue with France, and the Opp issue within Shinra... None of the three powder kegs have been resolved.

Especially the colonial conflict between Britain and France, because Dashun was involved in the muddy mud, the British side had no results.

In this case, the major contradictions in Europe have not been resolved.

In the context of military expansion, preparations for war, preparations for the next war during the truce, it is impossible to cut taxes.

The king is busy dealing with his fledgling son.The son complained all day long that his father was a "faint lord", and this time the war ended in this way, the title of this stupid lord could never be removed.

The old king was over 60 years old. After all, in history, his son died of a pulmonary embolism while playing tennis.

The confrontation between the two sides escalated rapidly.

In the cabinet, half of the people are busy fighting against the "patriots" around the royal party.

The other half, who are sober, understand that the most important thing to do during the truce is to create a good diplomatic environment before the next war begins.

The diplomatic situation is also very unfavorable. Dashun has drawn the Netherlands into the armed neutral alliance, and threatened to increase tariffs on Denmark, which is obviously wooing Russia and Sweden to monopolize the trade rights in the Baltic Sea.Not to mention France, Spain is still playing.If the diplomacy fails to open up the situation, something big will happen next time.

From the king to the cabinet, either out of indifference, out of helplessness, or because of the real overall situation, in short, they did not invest too much on the bright side of the direct flight of the Dashun Western Trading Company and the opium case focus on.

However, the impact of Dashun Western Trading Company on the United Kingdom actually caused an uproar among the people.

The background here is complex.

In the era of the Dashundang background board, the dispute between mercantilism and free trade in Britain because of its previous "self-confidence in handicraft industry".

There were disputes about parliamentarism, the power of kings, tradition and modernity, monarchy and hypocrisy.

There are also disputes over "religion" or "rationality," and "ruling the country by virtue" or "ruling the country by religion."

And these three factions will undoubtedly use Da Shun as a scarecrow.

Like Britain and China described by Voltaire, the truth is not important, but the position is important.

The point is that Dashun is too suitable to be this scarecrow.

The distance is too far, but the goods are close. Before Liu Yu came to Europe, he called for free trade there. After the end, Dashun was an imperial model—of course it was a wonderful model. The moral philosopher king, absolute monarchy, and bureaucratic cabinet system A thing that doesn't match at all, but it can be freely changed in the mouths of people from all walks of life as needed.

No one cares about the truth. The important thing is to use China to say what you want to say.

OK it's him.

He is also the bad one.

The dispute over "religion" or "rationality" peaks at the Hui Hui Kingdom in "Gref's Travels" which refers to "the China they talk about".

From the perspective of future generations, it may not be possible to feel the relationship between this Hui Yi country and China.

That's because the "China" at that time was not the real "China".

Rather, the system described by a group headed by Sir William Temple "has surpassed all imaginable systems such as Xenophon's system, Plato's Utopia, More's Utopia, and Harrington's Oceania. The China that governs with the greatest wisdom and reason.

It's just that Utopia, Oceania, and Utopia have been skinned, and a country that actually exists in reality, but is intangible and invisible to ordinary people.

After all, in the era when most people could not travel abroad, a real and powerful country sounded more believable than those Utopias and Oceania that they knew did not exist.

And now that Dashun has gradually stepped out of the background, the disputes between free trade and mercantilism, rationality and religion, and whether to strengthen the power of the monarch or continue to weaken the power of the monarch have been pushed to a new peak.

This time, the cargo ship of the Dashun Western Trading Company sailed directly to Europe. For those opponents, it should be said that it was a nightmare.

It is its own nightmare.

It is also a British nightmare.

The more real, closer, and ubiquitous in life, the more terrifying this nightmare will be.

The so-called nightmare of oneself is a very special emotion that many people in the UK have towards China at this time.

It's hard to put this emotion into words.

It is not a simple commodity shock.

A person who has died at this time can be used as an example to understand the mentality of some people in the UK at this time.

For example, Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe".

In it, there is a paragraph similar to "two trees in front of the door, one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree" to analyze why the author wrote this.

It is Defoe who always mentions various "clay pots" in his various novels.

Woolf, a female representative of stream-of-consciousness literature and who wrote Mrs. Dalloway, once commented: He repeatedly placed an ordinary clay pot in the reader's attention, and let us see through this pot. The remote deserted island, and the depths of the human soul...

But in fact, why does Defoe always like to write about clay pots and satirize porcelain?Is it really for readers to see the depths of the human soul?
No, actually, because Defoe opened a pottery factory with his friends before writing the novel.

Then, in those few years, a large number of Chinese porcelain entered the UK, and his pottery factory...

So Defoe has been raving about Chinese porcelain and China all his life.

Every one of his novels, there must be a paragraph such as "China's technology is actually very poor, just because their soil is good", "Porcelain and tea are vampires", "Stupid people in Britain are flocking to those stupid and insignificant wastes in China" and so on.

If it weren't for the wonderful imagination of describing the Chinese people's silly way of firing ceramics to fire houses.

Of course, Defoe died earlier. Before he died, Dashun might still be asleep, passively becoming a vampire.

The affected industries are also limited to the British pottery industry, which is not comprehensive enough.

But this time, the cargo ship of Dashun Western Trading Co., Ltd. sailed directly to Amsterdam, and the huge auctions made the headlines of the newspapers one after another. It was not just the dry pottery factory that was affected.

If it's just like this, it's just a shock, not a nightmare.

The nightmare refers to the fact that most of the affected industry practitioners and stakeholders are supporters of "free trade".

Including Defoe, they all have a nearly unanimous point of view:

China is not a country that pursues free trade, so our woolen cloth, pottery, wool, etc. cannot be sold on a large scale in China.

And trade is universal and sacred. Our goods are so easy to sell in Europe, but we can only buy them with silver in China. This must be the reason why China does not engage in free trade.

This is the source of their nightmare.

They believe that it must be China's trade policy that has caused their advantageous commodities such as woolen fabrics, clay pots, and wool to be unable to sell in China.

This self-confidence stems from the fact that their woolen fabrics are unbeatable in Europe.

But in China, they encountered a situation that they could only buy with silver, which they could not understand.

Protestants have a hard time understanding the logic of "we can't because we can't".

Instead, we naturally think that we are very good. If we are not good, there must be something wrong with the other side.

Protestants can't do it, because they are God's chosen people, and God doesn't choose trash, so they have to do it.

In their previous trade with Europe, they themselves sanctified free trade.

It has even become a kind of divinity that they believe in and is universally applicable.

Dashun's Western Trading Company came to Amsterdam this time, forcing them to make a choice between "faith" and "reality".

This is the true meaning of nightmare.

If the industry is only impacted, it is not a nightmare, it is at most a practical problem, and it does not involve the spiritual level.

(End of this chapter)