"One hundred million taels is certainly not a small amount," Grand Duke Luo twirled his beard and calculated in his mind for a while, "but it's not a big deal."
"What?" Song Shilie's old eyes almost fell out of his head. Is this what he said? Is this something a Ming magistrate can say?
One hundred million taels is not a big deal... How much do you, the Shanghai government, have to collect for the Emperor Zhu in a year?
Grand Duke Luo seemed to know what Song Shilie was thinking about, and he explained it with his fingers: "The Shanghai Mansion where I was appointed as a lower official immediately collected more than one million taels of agricultural taxes and military grain rent, and another more than one million taels of In addition to the commercial tax of more than 1 million taels, they also collected more than 1 million taels of commercial port land tax and land rent. In addition, there were more than 5 million taels of customs grain rice... A total of more than 6 million taels of these customs grain rice were sold! Adding these together, it’s almost tens of millions of taels! Mr. Song, do you think 100 million taels is too much?”
This, how is this possible! ?
Song Shilie was really shocked, and he couldn't tell the difference between reality and dreams.
One government collected 10 million taels... Although more than 6 million were actually tariffs, the remaining three to four million were real money!
How many mansions are there in the Ming Dynasty now? There should be a few of them that are no worse than Shanghai, right? For example, Yingtian Prefecture, Yangzhou Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture, Guangzhou Prefecture, Wuhan Prefecture, Raozhou Prefecture (Jingdezhen), Hangzhou Prefecture... 100 million, maybe you can really find it!
Song Shilie thought about it but it was wrong.
"Brother Grand Duke, isn't the Ming Dynasty at war with the Donglu? After three years of capture, countless wealth was wasted!"
Grand Duke Luo shook his head: "Not only are we fighting the Donglu, there is also a fight in the west, with the Yeerqiang Khanate! In addition, we have been fighting the Spanish at sea for several years, but no one has made it clear. They are using the sign of the Japanese, and they are using the sign of the Great Mongolia. No one is at odds with each other, nor are they fighting, but they are still fighting."
Three wars are being fought at the same time!
Not poverty-stricken?
Song Shilie couldn't believe it.
Grand Duke Luo actually didn't understand what was going on. He shook his head and said, "Logically speaking, people who engage in such a military campaign should be impoverished. But the problem is that in the past three years, everyone in the southeast area has become extremely rich, and the more we fight, the richer we get... .... Nowadays, all industries are prosperous and people are prosperous. I have been a county magistrate and magistrate in Shanghai for more than ten years. The past two or three years have been the best. I can make money in any business. And this is not the case in Shanghai alone. , as far as I know, all the state capitals in Jiangnan Province are prosperous!
Although the military expenditure of 100 million is a lot, the current situation in the southeast of Ming Dynasty should not be a problem. "
What is happening in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty is actually the "war boom", a very common economic phenomenon in the capitalist era!
Of course Grand Duke Luo had never heard of it, but Zhu Cixiang knew about it!
Although he has not returned to Nanjing much in the past two or three years, he has long been in control of the war boom phenomenon that occurred in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty.
This economic phenomenon is actually a matter of course for the current Ming Dynasty Southeast!
Because the southeastern part of the Ming Dynasty is a huge handicraft manufacturing center, it can produce a large amount of silk, porcelain, cotton cloth, ironware, ships, vehicles, leather goods, woodware, arms, armor, vehicles, gunpowder, salt, medicine, etc. every year. s things.
Daming Southeast can produce all the handicrafts needed by hundreds of thousands of troops to fight on the front line with high quality and quantity, and it can also organize a large and efficient logistics department to transport everything to the front line by land and water.
If there was only a developed handicraft industry, the Ming court would still be financially constrained, but there was actually no shortage of so-called "money" in the Ming Dynasty. After all, the handicraft industry in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty has not been prosperous for a year or two. Since the middle and late Tang Dynasty, the handicraft industry in the southeast has been very developed. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, with the help of the east wind of the Age of Discovery, the handicraft industry in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty earned hundreds of millions of taels of silver for the Ming Dynasty in just over a hundred years, and abruptly transformed China from a silver-scarce country. The country became a "silver empire" that could use silver as currency.
However, before Zhu Cihong took over, the economy of Southeast Ming Dynasty still had two huge flaws, which prevented it from transitioning to the primary stage of capitalism, and there was no way to turn huge amounts of silver from "dead money" into "living money."
One of the major flaws is that agriculture is not enough to support the further development of handicraft workshops - it is very unrealistic to think that capitalism can break away from the support of agriculture and rely on a small amount of metallurgy and metal processing industries to advance rapidly and enter capitalism.
Because the development of capitalist industry and commerce requires a large number of people to gather. If there are only a few people, how can you engage in industry and commerce? Early industry and commerce used "human sea tactics". Opening a mine, forging iron, weaving cloth, etc. all relied on manual labor. Without the gathering of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, it would be difficult for capitalist industry and commerce to gain sufficient momentum for development.
So many people gather together and no longer engage in agricultural production. How to solve the problem of feeding them?
Therefore, capitalism cannot be developed at all in places where agriculture is not developed enough, or where sufficient agricultural products cannot be obtained through low-cost transportation methods!
For example, Beijing, the original capital of the Ming Dynasty, could not develop capitalism in the 17th century - the hundreds of thousands of residents who supported the functions of the capital of the Ming Dynasty needed to import four million liters of rice from the southeast every year to feed them. What kind of capitalist industry and commerce could be developed in this case? If there are hundreds of thousands or millions of industrial and commercial residents, how much food will be imported?
In addition, early capitalist industry and commerce were often inseparable from the support of the textile industry. Whether it is wool spinning, cotton spinning, or silk weaving, they are all inseparable from the raw materials provided by agriculture and animal husbandry.
If the supply of food is no longer available, where is the rich land that can produce raw materials for handicrafts?
The agriculture of the Ming Dynasty was obviously not enough to support the development of industry and commerce - an important reason for the peasant wars in the late Ming Dynasty was that agriculture could not provide enough products! As the scale of production of cash crops continues to expand, the supply of food becomes insufficient...
Therefore, after Zhu Cihong took charge of Southeast China, he did not forcefully start any "industrialization", but focused his main energy on agriculture. Finding food for more than 100 million people is a top priority!
He had four methods. One was to abolish the tax-free privileges of scholar-bureaucrats, thereby eradicating the backward "receipt system" and making the circulation of land more market-oriented, so that small landowners and rich peasants who are good at agriculture can obtain more land. .
The second is to increase imports, through the two methods of "tariff tax" and "vassal expansion", to import rice from warm and humid Southeast Asia.
The third is the Yellow-Huaihe River Transportation Project, which used waste transportation to protect the Huaihe River and turned the areas on both sides of the Huaihe River that had been flooded for years into fertile soil for grain production.
The fourth is to increase the promotion of new crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes to strengthen agriculture's resistance to natural disasters.
After the four-pronged approach, by the time the Northern Expedition began in the sixth year of Hongxing's reign, the food supply in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty was already very abundant, and the price of food could be stable at around one tael of rice for a long time. The output of cash crops, such as cotton, mulberry leaves, tea, soybeans, etc., has also been rising steadily, enough to support the development of handicrafts and capitalism.
Another major flaw that curbed the transition to the primary stage of capitalism in the Ming Dynasty was the imperfect financial system! The so-called statement that hundreds of millions of taels of silver have been invested in land is actually nonsense. Silver does not turn into land, it can only be exchanged for land. Because the financial system in the mid-17th century was too backward and there was no large banking system to absorb the inflow of silver, silver became a collection rather than capital.
In the 17th year of Chongzhen's reign, Emperor Zhu promoted the establishment of Salt Merchant Bank and Maritime Merchant Bank, in order to establish a banking system that could circulate silver.
Because the banking system can create money through the multiplier effect, when the Ming Dynasty's financial system centered on the two major banks gradually matured. For the Ming Dynasty, "silver" was no longer the silver ingots placed in the official treasury, but a series of numbers on the two bank accounts... The military expenditure of 100 million taels was nothing more than the accounts of the Ming Household Department. The money I paid just went into other people's accounts.
