Chapter 513: Slavery and profit dispute

In the three provinces of Zhili, Henan and Shandong, if you are in the prefectures and counties, you can still see a prosperous scene. Various industrial and commercial industries are emerging one after another, and they are recruiting people to expand their scale. Merchants from the south of the Yangtze River and the coast come to buy and sell. Everyone has a smile on their faces. This is the best day in more than a hundred years. The food in the grain store is so cheap that it is scary, all of which are from Nanyang and outside the pass.

There is no problem for workers who work as long as they rely on their wages to make ends meet. What's more, every day, middle-aged people stand in the city gates and markets and shout, and recruit people for various workshops and shops. When they see young and strong people entering the city, they just come forward to chat with them. They just say, "It's not easy to live in the countryside now. After finally entering the city, wouldn't it be better to work to support the family? The wages are still rising!"

These joyful images are all in the city. It is really difficult to live in the countryside now, especially the honest and honest farmers.

The north is a place where clan forces are mixed. In many cases, county governments and government offices are not as effective as the clan resolutions of local tribes. The current situation is that local tribes are often the largest cotton field landlords. They rely on the clan power. On the one hand, they hire poor families of their tribes to grow cotton fields. On the other hand, relying on the scale of the clan and the force of colluding with desperadoes, they coerce people who are not the tribe to do cotton farmers to farm.

At this time, cotton farmers were not so employed as serfs. Their every move was monitored by the minions and thugs of landlords and squires, and they signed documents that had no freedom at all before farming. If they were written according to these documents, they would not have freedom even if they died.

What these serfs do every day is to cultivate farmland and work constantly without a stop. When they were hired farmers, they were unwilling to plant them and returned the fields to the landlords. Even if they were begging for food, no one would care about them. But now every manor is a country.

Without permission, the serfs were strictly prohibited from leaving the control of the manor's owner. There was often only one way to escape, that is, they were hacked to death and threw it into the ground and buried. They wanted to complain and see if they could run out. In the past, they said that the landlords of a certain family could not get out even if they walked for a day. Only a few large landlords had this scale. Now, after the bloody and rapid annexation, almost every county had a manor of such a scale.

In the past, the landlords' minions and thugs were at most holding wooden sticks and kitchen knives. Now they were riding tall horses with sharp weapons in their hands, and many people also had strong bows. Many bandits who used to be bandits on the mountain all became good people and became servants and guards. This bite of food tasted better than the previous ones. It was much more comfortable to have the last meal but not the next meal, and it also had the identity of a good citizen.

Even if they are still fighting for a gang outside, the main industry of these people is not to rob past merchants, but to focus on the villages that have not been merged, to plunder the population there and then sell it to cotton landlords. Is this money risky and it is much more stable.

It is said that society is constantly moving forward, from slave society to feudal society, and then continues to develop forward. In the end, the world is harmonious. However, in the rural areas of the northern three provinces, there is a dark-era slave society scene. At this time, the orders of the yamen cannot leave the city, because the countryside is now controlled by fewer and fewer people. The so-called official orders only require sending letters to the homes of these big landlords.

Not to mention the annual grain tax, let alone collecting. Not to mention that these big landlords have all kinds of fame and fortune, and have the right to be exempted from land taxes and labor. Even if they want to collect poor people and medium-sized families, these people are under the protection of those big families, and they only pay some money according to the money they should pay every year.

The old rules were that these landlords and gentry who were famous did not have to pay taxes and labor service. The yamen runners and tax collectors in the yamen were extorted and extorted from those poor families and always filled the gaps. At present, although the big landlords were not merciful to the farmers below, they were unwilling to disturb their work by other things, so they simply paid on their behalf according to the cap quota of these people.

The production and profits of one acre of cotton and one acre of grain are huge. If it were the past, the small households who planted cotton fields were tapped according to the annual income of cotton fields. But now, these big households say that the employed farmers are growing grain fields, and the yamen runners dare not say anything. After all, the other party has greater power, more money, and harder fists, so they can only go back in shame.

The biggest reliance on the financial levies of various prefectures was land tax. In this situation, land tax could not be collected at all. A magistrate in Qingzhou Prefecture, Shandong was forced to rush into a wealthy family and ordered the other party not to shelter the population and pay taxes in secret. The cotton fields planted must be paid in accordance with the national laws. After the "land inspection case", all industrial and commercial industries in the city did not have the privilege of tax exemption. Why do you do these tricks here?

Unexpectedly, the magistrate who collected all taxes was not a commendation from the Ministry of Personnel, but an impeachment from a censor in the court, saying that he was insulting his manner, greedy for money and seeking profits, and extorting local gentry. It was directly that there was no possibility of promotion after the post was over.

There is this example in front, and who will still stand out for this land tax? All the companies have fooled it, or they have increased taxes in the industrial and commercial shops and workshops in the city, and then bought grain from grain merchants to make up for the gap. They dare not touch the countryside again.

Some Ming people's notes once described this phenomenon, saying that grassroots bureaucrats could have acted as mighty and blessed, but now they can only speak loudly in prefectures and counties. Except for the city gates, they are completely the world of the landlords in the local area. Behind these people, they often have nephews who are officials in various places, and with their rapidly expanding wealth, the real magistrates and prefects are them.

Often, these people’s hired farmers made some mistakes. Everyone wrote complaints, which stated what crimes should be convicted and how to deal with someone. The county officials could only do it as they did, otherwise the grain tax would not be collected at all, and there were people in the officialdom who were making trouble and obstructing them everywhere, so the official would not have to go on the present.

In places where there are cotton fields, people who control a large number of cotton fields are above the government. Such people are comparable to the powerful people of the Han Dynasty. Their family members are getting closer and closer to the direction of private soldiers. In the long run, the country cannot collect taxes or even collect the source of troops. This is an extremely dangerous thing. The court will only give in to them a little bit, and the result can be imagined.

After writing this note, no one paid attention to it, or everyone kept silent, but one of the names of the landlords spread out - Cotton Seng.

The raw materials of cotton fields in the north are concentrated and the tight control of the subordinate population of cotton gentry is not a good thing for the handicraft workshops and shops in Jiangnan. The emerging industries and commerce in the north are basically related to Shandong's maritime trade. The things produced are mainly sold overseas. No matter which country people are in the country, they always have to wear clothes. Therefore, shops in the north only need to have sufficient raw materials and someone can do it, but there is no impact on others.

However, the weaving workshops in Songjiang, Suzhou and Hangzhou are different. About 40% of their market is in China. During the ban on the sea, this share is even higher. Although they now use new spinning and weaving machines, the raw materials are tied up by the merchants in the north, and the price of cotton is gradually rising. However, the middle and lower classes, which were the main customers of Jiangnan merchants, were surrounded by cotton gentry to make cows and horses, and what else can they buy?

The merchants who made food by weaving, especially those of cotton cloth, complained a lot. Many literati and officials from Jiangnan naturally had to speak for their own people. They began to promote them in the court and the people, saying that the northern three provinces treated farmers like this and treated animals. The sage education has always hated such cruel things. If these cotton gentry were allowed to continue like this, the Ming Dynasty's local power would inevitably be undermined, and these people would continue to expand, and they would inevitably repeat the disaster that the powerful in the Wei and Jin Dynasties disrupted the world.

Of course, the workshop of the Thirteenth Chamber of Commerce in Jiangnan enclosed employees in the workshop, which was also a trend of being like a slave. The Thirteenth Chamber of Commerce had strong force. The literati and officials in Jiangnan selected to ignore these things. These people just spoke for the interests they represented.

However, after they said this, there was no good response. The reason was that even the royal villages around the capital and the manors of ministers were planted now, and the large patches of cotton were planted. Theirs usually used military households in the garrison to farm them. This was the case at the top, let alone the people below.

When they were fighting with the three northern provinces and Jiangnan to make money, the southwest and northwest border towns seemed to have been forgotten. In this almost miraculous economic leap, they did not get any advantage. On the contrary, because the local handicraft industry was devastatingly hit by the coastal devastating blow, they were also full of complaints.

Faced with the boiling public grievances and the quarrels between officials from various factions in the court, Emperor Jiajing has been silent...
Chapter completed!