The Han culture is spreading strongly in Southeast Asia

Chapter 772 We Need the Seris Fleet to Appear in the Indian Ocean
Things are so magical. In history, England, which was about to launch the Opium War in forty years, had already almost become the thug of Dayu in the South Asian subcontinent through its Governor-General's Government in India.

After Mo Lao Si Mo Zhouzhe informed the Governor-General of British India, Eliuled Clark, of Dayu's conditions, he no longer cared about the Governor-General because Mo Zhouzhe knew that Governor Clark had no choice.

Either the news of their support for the Gurkhas would become public knowledge, causing an uproar in public opinion across China, forcing the Dayu Empire to retaliate by providing large-scale aid to the Kingdom of Mysore, or even directly bringing in its navy and army to start a war.

Or the British Indian Army could settle the matter they had caused themselves and use their blood and sweat to gain the forgiveness of Emperor Dayu.

Moreover, in addition to threatening Governor Clark, the Dayu Empire has another trick it can use, which is the slave trade.

After leaving Fort William, Mo Zhouzhe moved into Wyndham Manor in the north of Kolkata, and he moved in as the owner.

The English butlers and servants in the manor treated Mo Zhouzhe in exactly the same way as they would treat the Crown Prince of Wales, the future William IV.

Including the guards at the door, in addition to the 107 people from the Southern Tibet Special Independent Battalion led by Qin San and Qin Dingyang, there are also English guards from the th Marine Company of the Royal Navy.

They must be from England, because Scottish, Irish and German mercenaries are not qualified to serve as guards.

"Your Highness, Mr. William Dundas is requesting an audience outside the manor. He is the closest business partner of Lord Greenville, and Mr. Dundas has been managing Wyndham Manor for a long time."

Mo Zhouzhe had finished washing up and had almost finished a pot of very English black tea and a plate of pastries when the butler of Wyndham Manor came in to report.

The butler, with thick golden hair and a slender figure, spoke with a standard royal accent. He knelt on the ground and introduced the English merchants waiting to be summoned outside in a rhythmic voice.

Mo Zhouzhe understood as soon as he heard it. The person who came was none other than the half-owner of this manor.

Since I'm here and have forced the owner to live outside, I naturally have to give him a good face.

A standard aristocratic fake smile appeared on Mo Zhouzhe's face, and he also used the royal tone of the old London Union Jack.

"Okay, Morris, please invite Mr. Dundas to the living room. I haven't heard from the two Williams in a long time. It's a good opportunity for this William to introduce them to me."

The two William's mentioned by Mo Zhouzhe refer to the current Prime Minister of England, William Pitt the Younger, and the Foreign Secretary, leader of the House of Lords, and also William Pitt the Younger's cousin, Baron William Greenwell.

Four years ago, it was this Baron William Greenwell who was sent as an envoy to Dayu and reached an agreement with Mo Zhouzhe's elder brother, Crown Prince Da Laosen, for the Dayu Empire to import 150,000 laborers from India every year.

"Your Highness, it is great that you have come to Calcutta. Your humble servant, William Dundas, has a great deal to report to you."

This self-proclaimed person is truly humble.

Well, it’s not too wrong, because the largest shareholder of this labor service company founded by Baron William Greenwell in Kolkata is Mo Zhouzhe himself.

Although this was because his eldest brother, the Crown Prince, did not want to be involved in such a trade and asked Mo Zhouzhe to take the blame, it seemed correct to say that he was the boss behind the company.

"Mr. Dundas, you are not my servant, but my friend, a friend who serves me for our common good."

Mo Zhouzhe was also good at speaking polite words. As he spoke, he personally helped William Dundas, who was kneeling on one knee, to his feet.

William Dundas was not only the CEO of this labor service company, but his brother Henry Dundas was also the Home Secretary of the Kingdom of England and an important political ally of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger.

Such a person certainly cannot be treated as a slave.

"These are all the company's financial and personnel records for the past four years. I have strictly adhered to the rules set by His Royal Highness. Every one of the 670,000 Indian laborers sent to the Nanyang Mission over those four years can be traced back to every manor."

Seeing several guards from the Southern Tibet Independent Battalion carrying in a large pile of documents, Mo Zhouzhe nodded with a serious look on his face. He clapped his hands, and more than 80 experts who were transferred from the Imperial Academy of the Inner Court and the Criminal Law Department of the Embroidered Uniform Guard to process documents immediately came in to work on the spot.

This incident was actually one of the main reasons why Mo Zhouzhe came to Kolkata.

In order to make up for the shortage of labor in Nanyang, or to be more precise, too many small vassals and manor owners were appointed, but there were not enough slave laborers for these small vassals and manor owners, which led to a vicious cycle of declining land prices in Nanyang.

It was also to eradicate the increasingly rampant slave labor trade in Southeast Asia that could not be stopped even by confiscation of property and death.

Emperor Mo Zibu instructed Crown Prince Mo Zhousen and ordered the fourth prince Mo Zhouzhe to set up a labor service company under his name.

After its establishment, this labor company sent at least 150,000 Indian slave laborers to Southeast Asia every year, and each of them became a slave laborer for small vassals and manor owners in Southeast Asia.

However, according to Emperor Mo Da's spirit of not wanting the emergence of hundreds of millions of Indians in Southeast Asia, these black Indian laborers from India, called Kunlun slaves by the people of Dayu, were replaced every five years. When their term expired, they had to leave and would not be allowed to be recruited to Southeast Asia again until at least three years had passed.

At the same time, the workers' travel and other activities were strictly restricted. They could only stay in their fiefdoms and manors most of the time. Even if they appeared in the market, they needed to be accompanied by their employers.

To put it bluntly, this thing is the black slaves in Southeast Asia, but it is still better than black slaves. After all, the wages of workers must be paid on time every year. The employer does not have personal rights over the workers. The personal rights belong to the labor service company.

"Your task is to sort these things out as quickly as possible, then print three copies. One copy will remain with me, one copy will be kept by you, and one copy will be sent to the Zongli Yamen of the Nanyang Mission."

Mo Zhouzhe gave careful instructions, waiting for the three documents to be detailed, and then the Dali Temple, the Ministry of Revenue and Colonization Department, the Jinyiwei, and the Nanyang Mission Office would begin a joint investigation in Nanyang based on this document.

Anyone who violates the regulations, such as arbitrarily relaxing the migration of laborers to other places or killing laborers, will be severely investigated. Every laborer must be found alive or dead.

"Next year will be our fifth year, Mr. Dundas. I hope you can continue to be so meticulous. This is the most important factor for the company's continued survival."

As he spoke, Mo Zhouzhe patted a Fuxing Bank promissory note on the table. "This is 50,000 silver dollars. It's the cost of building the archives over the past five years. It was paid for by the imperial treasury of Dayu."

Such a complex personnel file tracking mechanism is naturally very expensive, and the labor service company cannot pay for it.

From a business perspective, letting labor service companies do the work would greatly increase the cost of labor for vassal states and landowners in Southeast Asia, which is not in line with the court's original intention of solving the labor shortage in Southeast Asia.

William Dundas took the promissory note with a smile on his face. This labor service company was very profitable because the cost for the English to obtain labor in India was quite low. They could just send out the army to capture them.

Many times, there is no need to even arrest them. All they need to do is deliberately aggravate India's already severe flood and drought disasters and create more "natural disasters."

Then there will be many people willing to go to Nanyang to work as laborers. Most of the time, they don’t have to pay any money. As long as they say they want to work, they will have food to eat. The number of people lining up to sign up will be so large that they can break down the door.

"Your Highness, I don't think this method can last long. It takes too much manpower to handle trivial matters. The key is that the people who do it cannot always have such high moral standards.

This is true for our people, as well as for the officials and nobles of the Seris Empire.

I think that in the end, a considerable number of workers will disappear through various channels, and slavery and imprisonment will undoubtedly occur. This trade may even become a major breeding ground for corruption among officials in the Seris Empire."

After hearing what William Dundas said, Mo Zhouzhe nodded in agreement.

With such huge interests at stake and such complicated operations, it is truly a test of human nature.

Human nature is the most vulnerable to the test. He estimated that in twenty years at most, terrible loopholes would appear in all aspects of this policy, and then the Kunlun slaves from India would still spread all over Southeast Asia.

No one could refuse such obedient and cheap labor, unless his father abolished the national policy of not allowing Han people to be slaves.

No, there is no point in abolishing it. Dayu is too big and there are too many good places. Only a fool would be a slave laborer. If the Han people were treated as slave laborers in Nanyang, they would dare to vote with their feet.

However, I heard from my eldest brother, Da Lao Sen, that my father's expectation is to last for about twenty years.

Twenty years later, the number of Han Chinese in Southeast Asia is estimated to reach 80 to 10 million. With so many people, and a few million more Indian laborers, it will be relatively easy to accept and digest them.

However, William Dundas saw that Mo Zhouzhe was silent and thought he was lost in thought. He smiled very secretly and said slowly:

"Your Highness, I wonder if you are interested in white slaves?"

In fact, in history, there were also white slaves who were considered equal to black slaves.

Not to mention that the Crimean Khanate sold millions of Russians to the Ottoman Empire as slaves over the past hundred years, even in North America today, there are still at least 200,000 white slaves.

At its peak, the population may have reached 500,000, accounting for one-third of the population at the time.

These white slaves were mainly Irish, Spanish, English and German, and their treatment was even worse than that of black slaves. This was because black slaves were the personal property of the slave owners, just like the livestock in the house, and there was no need to torture them to death.

However, white slaves had a contract period, just like the Kunlun slaves in Dayu today.

Even if there was no contract period, it would be easy for white slaves to escape because of their European appearance. Therefore, North American slave owners, including Washington and Jefferson, treated white slaves cruelly and exploited them desperately.

"We Europeans are much more capable of enduring hardships than the Indian blacks. In terms of appearance, European whites are also more easily accepted by Eastern whites, that is, the Seres whites."

William Dundas had an ambiguous smile on his face. "And we have stable suppliers, namely the Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Macedonians in the Balkan Peninsula.

This group of people, especially the women, are often strong, beautiful, family-oriented and very docile. They are very suitable as female slaves or to solve the problem that a large number of men in Southeast Asia find it difficult to find wives.

If the Seris Empire could attract 800,000 to 1 million white slaves, and let them receive treatment slightly lower than the laborers in the five eastern provinces, but slightly higher than the blacks in India, and they could be kept obedient without being tied up, wouldn't that be even better? "

William Dundas keenly sensed that the emperor's attitude towards European whites and Indian blacks was completely different, and the emperor did not mind having more white people in the country.

Perhaps this is inseparable from the fact that there have always been many white people (Indo-Europeans) living and even serving as officials in Seres throughout history.

Of course, this guy was just exaggerating about one million white slaves. His plan, or William Pitt the Younger's plan, was to get four or five hundred thousand or so.

If one assumes that each white slave makes a net profit of ten silver dollars, the total profit would be four to five million silver dollars.

This amount of money is not huge for the country, but it is enough for the family that initiated this trafficking operation.

Mo Zhouzhe had rarely seen women from these ethnic groups, but if his father, Emperor Mo Da, were here, he would know them very well.

Eastern European women, except for Gypsies, are really beautiful and strong.

Mo Zhouzhe smiled because he suddenly realized a factor, the Balkan Peninsula.

"My brother was involved, wasn't he? Or was this his effort to please His Majesty King George III?"

The brothers that Mo Zhouzhe mentioned were of course not his biological brothers, but his cousin, the eldest son of Prince of Lu Mo Zirong, and the Crown Prince of Lu Mo Gongze, who was currently living in England.

It is said that Mo Gongze is now pursuing George III's fourth daughter, Princess Mary, who is 21 years old this year.

Of course, considering Mo Gongze's bloodline, talent, and especially his looks, it shouldn't be called pursuit at all. Princess Mary had already been completely bewitched by him.

The only obstacle was that George III and the nobles in England still had great doubts about whether to switch from supporting William's family, the permanent ruler of the Netherlands, to supporting Murdoch's establishment of the Greater Netherlands.

William Dundas looked at Mo Zhouzhe in surprise. "Your Highness's wisdom is truly unmatched. This was indeed proposed by Prince Carl of Belgium. He even wrote a letter and asked me to give it to you."

Mo Zhouzhe took it and looked at it, then sighed. The reason why his cousin Mo Gongze was beating around the bush was for the same purpose as his elder brother, the prince, which was that they didn't want to have anything to do with the slave trade.

As for him, Mo Laosi has already been blamed for the Indian Kunlun slave trade, so it is not impossible for him to be blamed for trafficking Balkan Bodhisattva barbarians.

"I guess my descendants in the future will definitely label me a slave king." Mo Zhouzhe smiled bitterly, but he was not going to refuse because his cousin Mo Gongze had given him too much.

Five thousand Bodhisattvas every year, for a total of five years.

This was extremely important to Mo Zhouzhe, because he had always been dissatisfied with his fiefdom of Wanxiang, and had been trying to get his father, Emperor Mo Zibu, to change his fiefdom for years.

The best target is the Hanchuan kingdom of his second brother Mo Zhouxu, and this is not impossible.

Because the emperor's second son, Prince of Hanchuan, Mo Zhouxu, became the minister in charge of the Hexi Railway, he became unstoppable and has been serving as a minister in various places across the country to build railways in recent years.

Moreover, Mo Zhouxu really has the ability and experience in this area, and can be said to be the best candidate to build railways in Dayu at present.

His father, Emperor Mo Zibu, even intended to have him enter the imperial court and serve as the Minister of Works after the separation of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, specifically in charge of all matters including railways.

Under such circumstances, it was basically impossible for Mo Zhouxu to become a vassal, and he did not have the ability to govern Hanchuan Province, a province with complex ethnic conflicts and a population of 11 million.

It is said that my father, Emperor Mo Zibu, is currently considering dividing Hanchuan Province into three parts.

The land east and south of Pegu was given to my third brother, Prince Dancheng, Mo Zhouyu.

The Kingdom of Arakan, where the Mermaid Port, the home port of the Outer South China Sea Fleet, was located, was inherited by the eldest son of the second brother Mo Zhouxu, and Mo Zhouxu was enthroned as the Prince of Yongning as compensation.

This left a vassal state with a population of at least eight million, three times the size of Zhejiang Province.

The strongest competitor at the moment is the fourth brother, Mo Zhouzhe. He has been taking the blame everywhere over the years, cleaning up the bad guys for his father and eldest brother, etc., and his work is not in vain.

But Mo Zhouzhe has a fatal flaw, that is, his maternal grandfather's family can hardly be relied upon, because his father, Emperor Mo Zibu, grew stronger by swallowing up the capital of his maternal grandfather, the Guangnan Nguyen family.

The Tây Sơn uprising also killed almost all of the Nguyen clan members of Quang Nam, including his grandfather, his in-laws, and his cousins.

This led to him being forced to become a vassal, where he was in dire need of capable people and various resources.

"I will personally write a reply to my cousin, Prince Lu. I basically agree with this suggestion. Of course, the final decision lies with my father, the great Emperor Seris."

. . . .

Just when Mo Zhouzhe moved into Wyndham Manor, the heated discussion in the British Indian Governor's Palace in Fort William was basically over.

Strictly speaking, Governor Eliuled Clark, who came from a gentry family and not from an aristocratic background, always had no good solutions when he encountered aristocratic problems.

He said helplessly to the so-called British Indian high-ranking officials in the room, "We all know that the slave trading company controlled by William Dundas is involved in the interests of many bigwigs.

To be frank, I believe that the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and even His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, all have a huge interest in this.

I don’t think you want to offend these people.”

How powerful are these people reported by Governor Eliud Clark? Let's put it this way, William Pitt the Younger is the current Prime Minister, Speaker of the House of Commons Henry Addington is the next Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary Baron William Greenwell is the next Prime Minister, and Home Secretary William Dundas will become Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty in the future.

Compared with these people, the Governor-General of British India, Eliuled Clarke, is an absolute little Karami, and the subordinates of the Governor-General of British India are even more Karami among Karami.

"Your Excellency, Governor, I don't believe that the benefits of the slave trade alone will convince the Prime Minister and other important figures to support us in fighting for the Seres. I think we should be more cautious."

Some people still had different opinions. Governor Clark touched his forehead with a headache, and cursed the previous governor John Shaw who supported the Gurkhas in his heart.

"But we don't have time to seek instructions from the Prime Minister. The Mysore War has reached the most critical moment, and the Seris Empire will not allow us to destroy it." Governor Clark said with a headache.

"If we don't comply with the wishes of the Seris Empire, then if the Seris fleet really arrives, it will seriously endanger the kingdom's rule in India and may even attack us.

By then, the crime of losing India will be enough to court-martial us all!"

Now no one said anything. Even if there was only a one in ten thousand chance, this situation must be prevented, because if it happened, it would be a devastating blow to the Kingdom of England and to themselves.

"But we can only make a decision when the Seris fleet actually appears, because then London can't blame us for acting on our own."

Someone else said, and it makes a lot of sense.

Governor Clark nodded and said, "Yes, yes. We cannot surrender when nothing has happened. That would be equally sinful."

So, as soon as he left the meeting room, Governor Clark called his nephew over.

"Immediately inform Mr. William Dundas in secret and have him tell His Royal Highness Prince Seres that we need the Seres fleet to appear in the Indian Ocean, or even in the Bay of Bengal."

(End of this chapter)