At the end of Qin, I became a son of the plane

Chapter 624: The Collapse of the Serfdom System in the Ptolemaic State
When this number came out, the atmosphere on the scene fell silent. It was the first time that these Roman youths felt so directly how huge the gap between their homeland and the Han Dynasty was.

Claudius continued, "The gap between us and the Han is so huge that if we don't catch up with the natives of the New World, the future of us Rome will be in vain."

There were also quite a number of Romans in the New World. Although they were sold to the New World as slaves, they became civilians of the Han Dynasty's vassal states when they arrived in the New World. At that time, the New World was short of labor, and slaves could quickly obtain land in a few years, become landlords, and accumulate a certain amount of wealth. But at this time, they did not return to Rome, but tried to bring their relatives and family members to the New World, so the Romans still had some understanding of the situation in the New World.

The natives of the New World had been assimilated into the Han people, and they believed it without a doubt. Even the Romans, whose skin was different, spoke poor Han dialect after returning to Rome and called themselves Han. The Han people's assimilation ability was so terrifying that the Roman youths at the scene shuddered at the thought that their homeland would also be assimilated by such a giant.

"Where is the future of Rome?" a Roman citizen suddenly asked. Everyone looked at Claudius, hoping to get an answer from this Roman hero.

Claudius said seriously, "In the books you study, in the factories where you work every day. The future of Rome lies in industrialization. We in the Pax Romana want to organize the Romans to work efficiently and effectively, so that every Roman can be like the Han people, with enough machines in their hands, master more advanced skills, and create thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars of wealth a year, and continuously promote the efficient development of industrialization. Each of us Romans should even create more wealth than the Han people. Only in this way can we in Rome catch up with the Han people."

"Industrialization is a sophisticated machine, and we are all screws in it. To keep this machine running efficiently, we must work together and know what we can do. You are the core component of Roman industrialization, so I said that what you do is the most important thing for the entire Roman state. The future of Rome is in your hands."

Claudius excited the young people of Rome because for the first time they heard a method to catch up with the big men, but it sounded a pity that it was learned from the big men.

Although the Han Dynasty had a bad reputation in Rome in recent years, the Roman citizens and nobles who joined the Datong Society were all knowledgeable and idealistic. They understood that it was not shameful for the weak to learn from the strong. At least the path that the Datong Society was taking was the path that the Han Dynasty had taken. There was already successful experience waiting for them.

Unlike the Roman elders, who faced this distorted world, they did not find a way to strengthen Rome, nor did they find a way to prevent Rome from declining. Instead, they colluded with the Han Dynasty and sold out the interests of Rome. In Rome, they could clearly feel that the country was declining and weak, but those Roman elders could not change the current situation of Rome, nor could they come up with a solution, let alone implement it.

"Claudius, you are a hero of Rome. You should not stay in the three northern provinces, but go to Rome, become the consul of Rome, and change the decline of Rome," a Roman youth said excitedly.

"Yes, you should go to Rome to be consul." All the young people present said.

Claudius said, "Don't worry, I will return to Rome, but not now. I will continue to develop the three northern provinces and let more Roman citizens recognize the ideals of our Pax Romana. Then I will become consul and put Rome back on the right track."

September 45, 9th year of the Han calendar, in a small village on the outskirts of Memphis.

This village is extremely backward, most of the houses are either built with uneven mud bricks, or simply simple sheds made of reeds and thatch, which the Han people call a shack, but among these shacks, there are a few slightly better-looking houses, built with yellow mud and covered with bricks and tiles, which can be considered poor in this poor rural area.

Not far from the village, there is a field of golden wheat waves, indicating that it is a harvest season. Some of the wheat waves are dense, while others are sparse. The farmers look at the land with dense wheat waves with envy.

This is the land of the Sobek family, and at this time their whole family is happily harvesting in their own wheat field. The sickles made of tempered steel from the Han Dynasty are not only fast, but also extremely durable, much more convenient to use than stone sickles. Therefore, although the amount of wheat in their family is large, the harvesting speed is still very fast.

"Sobek, would you like me to help your family harvest?"

Sobek smiled and said, "Sure, I'll give you a meal, and after the harvest I'll give you 1 Hanu of food."

"Then it's settled!" After saying that, the man took his stone sickle to help Sobek harvest the crops, fearing that Sobek would object.

The land of the Ptolemaic State was state-owned, but it was not the state-owned system of later generations. It was closer to the state-owned system of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period in the history of the Han Dynasty, where all the land under heaven belonged to the king. From a legal point of view, all the land in this country belonged to the king.

Most of the land in the Ptolemaic Empire was in the hands of temple monks and local nobles. The people of Ptolemy were more like serfs in later generations. They worked in groups on a piece of land, and all the harvested grain, except for basic food rations, was obtained by the monks and noble groups.

These monks and nobles controlled the land and produced food using extremely inefficient slavery. At the same time, they did not focus on improving production tools and were unwilling to invest too much in the land. The result was predictable. The production capacity of the fertile land near the banks of the Nile River could barely approach that of the Han Dynasty. As long as I was a little further away from the Nile River, the food production capacity would plummet to the level of slash-and-burn farming.

Because of the scarcity of materials, they liked to use religion to paralyze the people of the Ptolemaic Empire and maintain the cruel and rigid caste slavery system for a long time.

Of course, this system is not absolute. The Han Dynasty ushered in the era of globalization, and Ptolemy was forced to be involved. However, it was still one of the few countries that benefited more. What came to this country were not only Han Dynasty's luxury goods, but also Han Dynasty's steel tools and machinery.

In the economically developed Alexandria region, small industrial areas have spontaneously emerged, including a steam engine factory from the Han Dynasty.

A small number of self-cultivating farmers have appeared in the countryside, especially in the past ten years or so. After the emergence of the Han variable, the number of self-cultivating farmers has increased significantly, and the speed of disintegration of state-owned land has accelerated.

Because the Han Dynasty hired a large number of Ptolemies to dig canals, a large number of Ptolemaic people changed from penniless serfs to citizens with certain property. After these people had money, they tried to buy land. At this time, a large part of the land of the nobles in the Ptolemaic Kingdom was controlled by the Han Dynasty's maritime merchants and money houses. They controlled the land of the Ptolemaic nobles not to work for the nobles, but to get money back. Now that someone wanted to buy land, they were naturally eager to turn these bad debts into money. Sobek's family was a representative of buying land and becoming self-employed farmers.

In this unknown little village, everyone is a farming noble and owns the land of the temple, but the Sobek family has their own land, as well as oxen and iron farm tools. Their family is the richest in the village, and Sobek, who created all this, is a powerful man in the village.

Every time the people who stayed in the village saw the land and new houses in Besoke, they would feel regretful. Ten years ago, the king sent an envoy to their village. He said that the Han people from the East wanted to build a canal connecting them to the ocean. They wanted to recruit some laborers from their village to dig the canal. They would also give them resettlement allowances and a monthly salary of 500 copper coins, which was enough to support their family.

At that time, the villagers did not believe it. Whoever believed it would be unlucky. This must be because the king wanted to build the pyramids and recruit laborers to trick them out of the village. So few people in the village were willing to go, and in the end, a few unlucky people were chosen to go but failed.

What the villagers never expected was that although the resettlement allowance was fake, the monthly salary was real.

Those who went to work for the Han people could bring back four to five hundred copper coins each month. The five unlucky guys who were pushed out at the beginning became the envy of the villagers. With the money they brought back, these five families bought land, repaired their houses, bought oxen and Han iron tools. Their youngest son who stayed at home got married, and the family's life became more and more prosperous.

The other villagers were envious, but there was nothing they could do. This was the will of the gods. Who told them not to dig the canal? This year, Sobek and his men finally came back. Everyone came back with big bags and small bags. They brought a lot of food from the East, as well as some cotton cloth and salt from the East. These goods were huge wealth for such a poor village. Because of their return, the small village was bustling for a long time.

Of course, the villagers also felt that they were laughing at the joke. Now that the high-paying jobs of the Han people were gone, these five families could become like them. It was a bit like the later generations who were afraid that their brothers would live poorly, but also afraid that their brothers would drive Land Rover.

In the following days, this nameless village was bustling almost every day. The five young people who had returned from the adventure did many things that puzzled everyone, such as repairing toilets and composting, which was difficult for them to understand.

They sowed two or three times more wheat seeds than them, and also planted a lot of cotton fields. They were busy in the fields all day long, weeding and fertilizing. The villagers didn't understand why they were so busy. The agriculture in Ptolemy was extremely primitive, only slightly better than slash-and-burn agriculture.

Besok and his men did not hide it, but told them directly that this was an advanced farming technology they learned from the Han Dynasty. If they did this, the productivity of the fields would increase by 2 to 3 times.

This made everyone in the village laugh. For so many years, our ancestors have been farming like this. During the harvest season, the production capacity would indeed increase by 20% to 30%, but how could it be possible to increase it by two or three times?

Sobek and his men swore that the Han people's fields had such high productivity. But the villagers didn't believe it at all. Instead, they watched these people busying around with a mentality of watching the fun, and even felt a little proud. Although these people made money, they also learned stupid things.

The priest in charge of farming had heard of the Han Dynasty's farming techniques, but he didn't know the specifics, so he planned to watch Sobek and the others use the new method to farm. If it was successful, these priests also planned to promote this farming method.

However, the story of Sobek and his men attracted the local villagers. On their free nights, the villagers would gather in the yard of Sobek's home to hear how Sobek and his men dug the canal.

Hanergy distributes steel tools that can dig up soil with just one shovel, and can even shovel away rocks if they hit them. There are also machines as tall as a house that can move automatically and can pull away a pile of soil as big as a house at a time.

"What kind of magical weapon is this?" This machine that can walk automatically must be a weapon from the gods.

Sobek said, "That's called a tractor. One tractor is worth hundreds of ox carts."

"Wow!"

What Sobek and his friends had seen and heard over the past 10 years became the best gossip material in the village. They told stories about digging the Suez Canal, how the Yanzhou Governor's Office was built from scratch, how a magnificent city was built in the desert, how the Gobi Desert was transformed into pastures, and the countless cattle and sheep in the market. All of this was listened to as a myth by the villagers, who were extremely envious.

Then Sobek talked about the Han Dynasty he knew, telling everyone that it was a country that had abolished slavery and that everyone in this country was a citizen. The emperor of the Han Dynasty told the citizens of the Han Dynasty that they were also the masters of the country.

And tell everyone that the Emperor of the Han Dynasty did the same thing. He divided the country's land into 100-acre portions and distributed it all to the citizens of the Han Dynasty.

"The 100 acres of land in the Han Dynasty is more than twice as large as ours, and their farming techniques are more advanced. The harvest is several times greater than ours. The income of the nobles cannot compare to that of the citizens of the Han Dynasty."

When the villagers heard that the Han Dynasty was distributing land equally, they felt both envious and jealous. Except for Sobek and his five families, the rest of the village were poor and had nothing. They had to go to the temple to get seeds for their work and borrow tools from others. Apart from filling their stomachs, they had nothing. When they learned that there was a god-king in the far east who would divide all his land among the citizens, one can imagine how complicated their hearts were. After farming all their lives, they also wanted to have a piece of land of their own.

Time passed quickly, and the villagers found that Sobek's family's fields were indeed growing better than theirs, and this was more obvious as the autumn harvest approached.

By September, those people who had laughed at the joke before were now surrounding Sobek's fields and were amazed at how there really was such a farming technique that could increase the yield threefold.

Of course, although these villagers were envious, they had no intention of learning, because they also saw the hard work of increasing production. All they had to do to farm was poke a hole in the ground with a wooden stick, drop in the seeds, and then wait for the Nile River to flood for irrigation, rely on God for rain, and then wait for the autumn harvest. Although the harvest was poor, they did not need to put in too much labor.

This is very important to the villagers. The less effort they put in, the longer they live. Those who work hard would have starved to death long ago. They can be said to be serfs of the nobles' sacrifices. Even if the grain production capacity is increased by two or three times, the increased grain production capacity will not go into their stomachs. They will still be hungry. In this case, why should they spend their energy to work hard to harvest more grain and give it away for free to these nobles who sacrificed. No one is a fool when it comes to protecting their own interests.

The Sobek family's land was about 50 acres in Han mu, with silt brought by the Nile River and advanced Han technology learned by Sobek and his family. The Sobek family worked hard for a month, and after drying all the grain, they weighed it and found it was about 150 shi in Han terms. According to the current price of grain in Memphis, the grain was worth 15000 Han coins.

The Han system has now become one of the commonly used systems in Ptolemy, because most of Ptolemy's grain is exported to the Yanzhou Governor's Office of the Han Dynasty. The Governor's Office is impatient to convert Ptolemy's complicated grain measurement units and directly uses the Han Dynasty's stone to calculate. Ptolemy is at the downstream of the industrial chain. If it wants to do business with the Han Dynasty, it naturally has to learn the Han Dynasty's system and units.

Of course they are happy to do this. Not only is the conversion of their country's copper, silver and gold coins complicated, the key is that the quality is poor. Not to mention the shortfall in weight, the silver and copper coins also have many impurities. In recent years, even the copper coins have become whiter and whiter, and there are fewer and fewer things that can be bought with them.

Relatively speaking, the paper money of the Han Dynasty is a more practical currency. The price is exactly what it is. There is no need to worry about the weight or depreciation. With this money, you can buy the goods of the Han Dynasty. However, for the big merchants, nobles, and priests of Ptolemy, it is difficult to earn the currency of the Han Dynasty. Ptolemy has always been in a state of trade surplus, and even the countries in the entire Mediterranean region are in a state of trade surplus with the Han Dynasty. It is more difficult to get foreign exchange than in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of its high value preservation, the circulation of the Han Dynasty's paper money in Daqinzhou is better than that in the Han Dynasty.

Sobek's father said excitedly: "With so much food, our family won't have to worry about starving in the future."

In order to store the food, Besok's family quickly built a small granary and bought a cat to catch mice.

"I will find you a wife this year to continue your value. With your ability, you may become a noble in the future. The glory of the family will depend on you." Besok's father's eyes are shining now, as if his family has returned to the aristocratic class.

But Suoke refused and said, "I want to rebuild our house. This mud house is too uncomfortable to live in. I learned how to build a quadrangle courtyard in Yanzhou Governor's Mansion. We can go to the city to buy bricks and cement, and then ask the villagers to help build it. It only takes one month to build a quadrangle courtyard. With this house, my brother will not be discriminated against."

(End of this chapter)