Xia Hongsheng felt that if Guda also had headlines, then all the headlines in Quanzhou in the past few days would have been occupied by Yiren Firm. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

The whole city was talking about the Yiren business, and it was in the limelight for a while.

The fame spread, and so did the business.

Xia Hongsheng has done his homework, and the current maritime merchants are basically a mixed maritime merchant of feudal and leased types.

The so-called feudal maritime merchant is a kind of maritime merchant in which the "wealthy family", "powerful eunuchs" and "feudal gentry" raise 'righteous men' and "good people", or use their subordinate shipbuilding to directly go to sea for trade. In this form, the maritime merchant and the shipwright belong to the "family", and the relationship between master and slave is not that of employment. Each ship is built by a wealthy family, and the name of the person who drives the ship is called the future life, and the owner of each ship is rich and strong, with forty or fifty people on each ship, carrying goods to the sea, buying and selling along the way, selling the goods on the ship after the end point, and then buying and selling local goods again, buying and selling along the way again on the return trip, and finally returning with a shipload of overseas things, and continuing to sell. Cycle back and forth.

The so-called leased maritime merchants were some merchants who could not afford to build ships, but were eager to trade at sea, rented ships from wealthy merchants who owned sea ships, hired sailors, and brought other merchants to the sea to trade. This type of boat owner operates in a very similar way to the leasehold farmers in Western Europe. The wealthy merchants who owned the ships received rents for the leases, and the merchants who chartered the ships obtained surplus value by exploiting the sailors and helmsmen. In fact, here is a bit of Marx's meaning of the three social classes, that is, "the landlord gets the rent, the capitalist gets the profit, and the worker gets the wage." "This is actually a kind of land-renting farmer-style landlord with the embryonic nature of capitalism, except that here, the leased land is replaced by a chartered ship, and the tenants are replaced by small maritime merchants, and the tenants rent land for cultivation, and the small maritime merchants rent ships to go to sea. Broadly speaking, this kind of charter-type maritime merchant who charters ships to go to sea for trade has somewhat been associated with the embryonic form of capitalism.

And several big maritime merchants in Quanzhou are a mixture of these two. They own their own sea vessels, arrange for their cronies to take ships to the sea for trade, and at the same time lease their own sea ships to other smaller maritime merchants who do not have the ability to build ships and do not own their own sea vessels, and these smaller maritime merchants rent sea ships from the hands of these big men and carry their goods to the sea for trade.

Therefore, in Quanzhou's maritime merchants, there are actually one and two lines. The first-tier maritime merchants benefited from directly going to sea to trade with their own seagoing vessels and leasing seagoing vessels to merchants who could not afford to own their own seagoing vessels, while the second-tier maritime merchants benefited from leasing the ships of the first-tier large-headed maritime merchants to go to sea.

However, the Yiren firm established under Xia Hongsheng's instructions decided to be a mixture of two other types of maritime merchants.

A mix of sole proprietorship and joint venture.

Sole proprietorship is a maritime merchant who generally has abundant capital, recruits employees, builds his own ships to travel across the oceans, and operates in foreign lands overseas. From this point of view, it is somewhat similar to the feudal type. However, the difference is that wholly-owned marines spend a lot of money to recruit crews. This form of recruiting seafarers, including sailors, helmsmen, craftsmen, etc., as pure merchants, to go to sea to trade, and to open sub-businesses overseas to conduct trade and earn profits is actually the prototype of modern shipping business owners.

As for the joint venture type, this form of maritime business is not good and is easy to involve disputes. However, this method has an incomparable advantage over several other types of maritime commerce, that is, it drives the development of maritime trade, drives more people to participate in maritime trade, promotes maritime commerce to actively expand and explore, expands the scale of maritime trade, and promotes the advent of the Age of Discovery.

This is also a very important thing that Xia Hongsheng wants to do in Quanzhou.

Because the internal structure of this kind of joint venture is "each ship pushes the rich and the rich, medium and heavy goods, and the rest uses their own capital to go to the market, making more than 100 profits". That is to say, in addition to jointly raising funds to purchase "heavy goods" to go to sea for trade, each merchant can use his own capital to purchase goods and go to sea for trade with ships; Even those crew members who are invited to serve on the ship, except for the important staff, the fire chief, the deputy of finance and the chief pole, who are given subsidized wages, the other personnel are also not paid, but can carry the profits obtained from the sale of smuggled goods to the ship as wages according to the regulations. In this way, both the joint venturers and the employees of the ship are able to operate overseas trade with the attitude of the owner, and they have received the effect of helping each other in the same boat, and they have become more active. Therefore, there is no personal dependence between the ship's merchants, crew members and the shipowner. Moreover, this joint venture organization is not permanently fixed. Whenever a trade trip to the sea is over, the old form of joint venture is declared to be terminated, and then the investment is regrouped according to the new situation and the wishes of the merchants. Therefore, these joint ventures of maritime merchants and sailors belong to free traders and sailors who have been freed from feudal fetters, because they are all united by their own interests, so everyone is very active, and the whole fleet is very dynamic and expansive.

Yiren Firm's own sea vessel operation uses this sole proprietorship method. The way to cooperate with other businessmen is this joint venture.

The contract drafted by Xia Hongsheng is also this kind of joint venture contract.

In this way, the Yiren firm was able to drive many merchants who could not afford to own sea vessels to go to sea to trade, because this form of joint venture was much cheaper than the form of leasing sea vessels.

Xia Hongsheng hopes to use this move to drive more people to join the ranks of overseas trade with smaller costs and higher returns. When the industry of overseas trade is rapidly saturated, maritime merchants will take the initiative to open up a broader overseas market, and then with the encouragement of the imperial court policy, it will inevitably trigger a strong trend of exploring and developing overseas markets and bringing back overseas wealth. And the Age of Discovery, it is bound to follow this trend and come in advance in Datang!

"Childe, the people who want to cooperate with us to go to sea these days are about to break our threshold!" Shen Rong was very excited and said to Xia Hongsheng: "As soon as this contract of the son comes out, I'm afraid that more people will come!" ”

Xia Hongsheng smiled and asked, "Shen Rong, what do you think will happen if this contract comes out?" ”

"Childe, according to your contract, I am afraid that in the future, those merchants who do not have their own sea ships will no longer cooperate with those other big maritime merchants." Shen Rong smiled and said, "Childe, we have to guard against those big-headed maritime merchants from joining forces to deal with us, black and white, those people are unscrupulous." ”

Xia Hongsheng nodded: "Yes, then according to you, how do we have to guard against it?" ”

Shen Rong saw Xia Hongsheng's calm smile, obviously he was already clear in his heart, this was testing him, so he immediately replied: "Childe, those big sea merchants want to deal with us, and the means are nothing more than a few ......" (to be continued.) )