New Shun 1730

Hancock and others were very supportive of Dashun's statement that they should educate their king and government, and believed that Dashun was doing the right thing.

The North American market is a very potential market with very strong consumption power. There is no doubt about this.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution had not yet broken out in Europe at this time, but the living standards of "people" in the thirteen states of North America were really very high.

It is so high that compared with the population of most countries two hundred years later, the living standards of North America, which has nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution at this time, are still much higher.

Of course, what we are talking about here is "people" under the three views of North America at this time.

Excluding those who have been expelled, the average asset of each family in some southern states is 392 pounds, equivalent to about 1,200 taels of silver; in the north, the average asset of each family is 252 pounds, equivalent to about 750 years of silver.

This refers to the rural average.

Farmers in North America and farmers in Dashun are both farmers. But farmers and peasants are different.

There was no need to defend against the invasion of northern nomads such as the Xiongnu, Khitan and Mongolia, no need for labor to repair the Yellow River embankment every year, and the land snatched from the aboriginal people made it possible to make money as farmers in North America even decades after the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution. Land is still the dream of many European workers.

With the production tools and agricultural productivity levels at this time, each homesteader family could cultivate a hundred acres of land without any pressure.

Leave part of the grassland, or plant pasture to raise cattle or sheep and drink milk.

A part of the land is left fallow and burned with fire in autumn to fertilize the field and eliminate weeds.

There are dozens of acres of land left to plant one kind of land.

According to the descriptions of some officers at this time, this pastoral life was really pleasant and relaxing:

[There is no place in the world as leisurely as the farmer in North Carolina. He is closer to the description of the promised land than anywhere else: the yield of corn is so high here that you only need to plant a little to fill the stomachs of the whole family. With the help of lowland grasslands, they can obtain meat easily; the highlands are covered with various wild fruits and berries...]

[During leisure time, men lie in bed and sleep soundly until the sun has completed one-third of its journey and driven away all unhealthy moisture. They yawned, stretched out their legs, lit cigarettes, and came outside under the protection of a cloud of smoke...]

[When the sky was high and the sun was rising, they hugged their arms and leaned on the fence next to the corn field, seriously considering whether to go to the pub for a drink in the evening...]

This is not the chaos during the Westward Expansion Movement, nor is it the confusion caused by the destruction of the paradise of the yeoman farmers and petty bourgeoisie caused by the development of capitalism in the 1830s. This is the pastoral era that truly belongs to the yeoman farmers and petty bourgeoisie.

There is no aristocracy.

There are no taxes.

There is no need to build river embankments due to flooding of the Yellow River.

There were no raids by northern nomads.

No military service is required.

There were British government troops, fighting for North America under Pitt's policies, wiping out their enemies one by one.

There are no tropical diseases.

Technologies such as iron tools, blast furnace iron, and ox farming have spread.

Fertile soil has millions of years of accumulated fertilizer elements that remain unused.

Like Dashun, "As a farmer, I can plant hundreds of acres of land, but I don't have that much land to plant"; "As a tenant farmer, I also want to raise cattle, but I don't even have the grassland to feed the cattle"; "Poor peasant, I have three acres of land, and I don't need tools like a columbine at all. Even if I dig holes with my fingers and tap seeds with my tongue, I can plant all three acres of land." The situation is completely different.

Even though the vast majority of farmers in North America are still there, and the Industrial Revolution has not even happened yet, the life of being a homesteader here is indeed pleasant.

Industrial development will indeed destroy the small peasant economy.

But for different farmers, the degree of harm is different.

The impact of cheap cloth, for a family with 60 acres or 360 acres of land, the worst possible outcome is that my wife will stop rubbing wool, and I will sell two more carts of corn, enough to clothe the whole family.

The impact of cheap cloth has made a man who owns three or four acres of land still have to rent land for farming. If the food is not enough, he must mix it with wild vegetables and plant some cotton on the edge of the field. His wife will spin yarn for three to five years to change her clothes, and she will spin yarn to exchange for more cotton and then spin yarn. For a family that eats more salt, the impact will be different from that of a family that can solve the problem by selling two more carts of corn.

Although they are all called farmers, they are also called small-scale peasant economy.

And farmers in these two different situations have completely different consumption abilities for tea, cotton, etc.

The extreme underdevelopment of agriculture before the exchange between the East and the West, the late emergence of blast furnace iron technology and cattle plowing and ridge farming, as well as the violent Black Death in the late Middle Ages, coupled with the price revolution caused by Spanish silver, made Europe and the United States inferior in Eastern and Western agricultural technology. After the exchange and the exchange of species between the old and new continents, it immediately became a huge market with strong consumption power.

Many people of later generations, when studying the yield per mu, intentionally or unintentionally replaced acres with mu, and replaced the unit of weight of small quarters with large quarters, and came to many strange conclusions, but these conclusions are not true. , otherwise the British Agricultural Revolution would be meaningless.

For Europe, because agricultural technology is underdeveloped and carrying capacity is limited, after the technological explosion, the means of production owned by each farmer remained unchanged but the production efficiency increased. The wheat yield per mu increased from 54 kilograms in the early 17th century to 18th century. 130 pounds.

For North America, the vast land makes the tenancy system almost impossible to exist. The area that homesteaders can cultivate can almost reach the productivity limit of the Iron Age of cattle farming.

Even if most people are still farmers, their consumption capacity is extremely huge.

Of course, Hancock and others cannot think so rationally. They only know from their sensibility and common sense of daily life that the tea, cloth, porcelain, etc. shipped by Dashun can all be sold very well.

As long as there is no family that has been expelled from the country - for example, North America does not describe the hands of black people as "hoofs" at this time. Some small self-employed farmers who have family slaves may eat with their family slaves, which will be disgusting to many people and be considered incredible: it is hard to imagine that our hands and their hooves are on the same table - in fact, they have the ability to consume tea, cotton cloth and low-end porcelain.

And Dashun's high-end products, high-end silk and porcelain, etc., of course, are not worried about sales. North America is a colony after all. As long as it is a colony, there is a subconscious self-deprecation of the motherland, especially in terms of culture. Washington once wrote a letter to a friend specifically asking him to help buy a batch of Chinese porcelain, which must be consistent with the popular styles of the European upper class, "If it is different, then don't buy it." After these people became rich, they naturally wanted to move closer to what they thought was the upper class, and the upper class in Europe was now experiencing a Chinese fever.

At least, before the excavation of the ancient city of Pompeii, even the architectural and gardening culture had begun to invade the European upper class. It was only with the excavation of the ancient city of Pompeii that the neoclassical aesthetics began to recognize ancient Rome to shape Christian civilization. This aesthetic infiltration of Eastern culture, with the peaks of Kew Gardens in the UK, the Nanjing Pagoda in the Forbidden City, and the Chinese Palace in Sweden, came to an end.

It seems that everything is beautiful.

Production.

Consumption.

Market.

Culture.

Demand.

It also includes religious issues. Dashun’s attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church made the Puritans in North America not extremely disgusted with Dashun. Heresy is more hateful than paganism.

And so on, and so on, all fit in.

But there is a very annoying problem that cannot be avoided.

Hancock and others are all North American businessmen. Their vision is still very low at this time, and they cannot see some things at a more macro level.

This is also an important reason why Dashun chose to divide North America instead of instigating the separation of North America.

This very annoying and unavoidable problem is called "currency".

Currency is too magical and full of contradictions.

It is not that North America does not have currency, but the currency of North America is not what Dashun wants, or it can be said that it is useless after Dashun wants it.

The currency of North America is currency, an equivalent.

It can buy corn, tobacco, fish, shrimp, slaves, meat, cattle, etc., but Dashun merchants do not want any of these things, because they are all money-losing goods when shipped back.

The currency that Dashun wants may not be just silver.

Gold is also fine.

Copper is also fine.

Or anything else that can be shipped back to Dashun and make money is actually fine.

However, what North America lacks now is this thing.

Historically, Lao Ma once commented on the Western Gold Rush at that time, saying that this was a more important thing than the February Revolution in France at that time, which drove away the Restoration Dynasty and rebuilt the Second French Republic.

The east coast of North America lacks precious metals.

North America is not South America, nor is it Peru, nor does it have Potosi.

From the perspective of precious metals, the east coast of North America is very barren and does not have enough gold and silver.

Although one of the twelve major grievances of the United States was that Britain prohibited North America from making its own currency, in fact, Britain prohibited the private and excessive issuance of paper money in North America.

In the early days, in Massachusetts, the currency used by early immigrants was shells.

After perforating white shells, six were counted as one penny; after perforating black shells, three were counted as one penny.

However, the advancement of productivity and the widespread use of iron tools made this kind of money almost the same as printing paper: If I had a diamond drill for baking pans and pots, and drilled shells at home every day, wouldn’t I make a million a month?

About 40 years later, shell currency depreciated on a large scale.

North America began to use corn as currency, but corn as currency has a disadvantage: it is too big and too heavy. If I go to buy a foot of cloth, do I have to carry a sack of corn from home to buy it?

The thirteen states also adapted to local conditions.

Massachusetts gave up shells and started using corn, Virginia used tobacco, and Connecticut used wheat.

This was determined by the Puritan doctrine, the class consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie, such as industry and commerce.

Because at this time, the land called the Bahamas under the feet of the smugglers was one of the starting points of the "American Dream". At the beginning, hundreds of Puritans gathered in the Bahamas and fought over the "political power" issue derived from the doctrine.

One side believed that there should be at least an organization like the Presbyterian Church and the Senate; the other side believed that any organization was useless and there should be no government at all.

Hundreds of people, fighting into two factions, never interacting with each other until death.

This doctrine, class culture, and the current situation of small-capital landowners in North America have made the currency itself a thing without a "government credibility", either in kind or in gold and silver.

Until these years, with the development of North America, the reason why the British felt a little wronged was the issue of the Navigation Act in the Twelve Regrets of the Rebellion. Before 1750, it did protect the development of industry and commerce in North America, instead of completely destroying the development of industry and commerce as in the Twelve Regrets. Because the gold and silverization of North American currency began in the early 18th century, if there was a pure trade deficit, no gold and silver was produced locally, or simply destroyed industry and commerce, North America would not have been able to achieve the gold and silverization of currency. Only a large amount of gold and silver can make the currency gold and silver, just like the basis of the silver monetization of the Ming Dynasty was the silver inflow from foreign trade.

The dividing line of 1750 was just because of the previous protection policy and the industrial support of hundreds of thousands of taels of silver each year, which made dyes, canvas, etc. begin to exceed Britain's own needs.

Even so, Dashun was still worried, because the accumulation of gold and silver in North America was still not enough to conduct extensive trade with Dashun.

If it really let go, the gold and silver would be sucked away in three years at most. Dashun didn't want paper money.

The shortage of precious metal currency in North America is not a headache for North America, but Dashun is.

Dashun must not only solve the trade problem in North America, but also the problem of insufficient currency in North America, otherwise the vast market in North America will be invalid and meaningless.