Chapter 141 Central Asian Horse Bandits

At the end of July, with the end of the war, there was also a wave of immigrants from East Africa. For more than half a year, Ernst poached corners, and the South German region was instantly hollowed out.

In order to seize the new land captured in the war, the Hechingen Consortium increased its immigration efforts. In addition to using all its ships for immigration, it also hired a large number of ships from the Nordic region.

Now that the war is over, the number of immigrants is sufficient, and the immigration potential of South Germany has been exhausted by Ernst in a short period of time. It will only take a while to accumulate a wave.

Not only did the number of German immigrants fall back to a low level, but due to early development, immigrants from the Far East and the Austro-Hungarian Empire also reached a low level.

The Far East is currently in a period of very political stability, especially after the Nian Army was pacified and order in the north was re-established.

The perennial large-scale wars in the Central Plains and North China have basically ended, and from the beginning of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to the Nian Army uprising, many areas from south to north were destroyed. Now the rulers of the Qing Dynasty want to restart local production, which requires a lot of population.

In addition, immigration conditions in East Africa have always been relatively high, and just being in good health can screen out a large number of smokers and disease-infected people in rural areas.

If you are too weak, you will almost die on the sea, and the conditions for immigrants in the Far East are definitely worse than those for European immigrants.

After all, European immigrants will go back to visit relatives in the future. If they complain about the poor conditions on the ship to East Africa, wouldn't it scare off a group of people?

As for the immigrants from the Far East, they are not qualified to be picky, especially the immigrants on Dutch ships. They are basically a mixed bag of people and goods, and their living conditions are even worse. They are almost as good as black slaves.

Fortunately, East Africa provides money based on survival rates, so the Dutch shipowners did not go too far.

Among the many immigrants, only those from Paraguay and the Middle East remain stable.

The Paraguay War was still going on, and the coalition forces were getting closer and closer to victory. The staff of the Hechingen Consortium followed the advancement of the front and slowly spread the business of recruiting people to the interior of Paraguay.

The immigrants from the Middle East are all women. The business of Zanzibar merchants is getting bigger and bigger. Now they not only trade slaves with East Africa, but also take over the promotion of products from the Hechingen Consortium.

Large quantities of goods, and tobacco, entered the Middle East, and Zanzibar merchants only had to pay East African colonial women.

This is human trafficking, but the Sultanate of Zanzibar enjoys it. Now the source of immigrants from the Middle East is not limited to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. They have even connected with Tsarist Russia, and their business scope reaches directly to the Central Asia region of Tsarist Russia.

Naturally, the nobles of Tsarist Russia have no moral integrity. The products of the Hechingen Consortium are considered hard currency in Tsarist Russia.

The Tsarist Russian officials in Central Asia are definitely not as good as the European gentlemen, and their conditions are better than those in the exile area in Siberia.

Therefore, it is difficult for Tsarist officials in Central Asia to get more money. Now they only need to use Turkic women to exchange for goods.

For Tsarist Russian officials, this is a business without capital, so the originally relatively stable Central Asia region has recently become rampant with horse bandits, specializing in robbing wealth and women.

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With the decrease in immigration, Ernst conveniently devoted more of his ocean shipping capacity to the transportation of goods. In the past few months of the war, in order to fill the gaps in the newly occupied areas as quickly as possible, the Hechingen Consortium was overloaded with immigrants and spent a large amount of money in an instant. money.

Now that the entire population of East Africa has exceeded one million immigrants, Ernst is no longer in a hurry to immigrate. The number of immigrants can return to normal levels every month.

Now what Ernst really cares about is reducing the construction costs of the colony and realizing the implementation of cement, ironware, food processing... in East Africa.

For a long time, East Africa has relied heavily on imports of modern industrial materials such as cement. However, there are not many raw materials for these industrial materials in East Africa and they can be produced by themselves. What East Africa lacks is factories and other facilities.

The first country in Europe to carry out industrial cement production was the United Kingdom in 1824. Then cement factories sprouted all over Europe.

Cement is not high-tech to begin with. Of course, this high-tech is higher than that of European and American countries. Countries other than Europe and the United States still need to import a large amount of cement.

It is not difficult for the Hechingen Consortium to obtain cement production equipment (the first cement plant in Asia was built in Japan in 1871). It can be solved by simply acquiring a small cement plant in Germany.

There are so many states in Germany, and each state has some industries, so it is very easy for Ernst to obtain some technologies and factories.

He did what he said, and soon the Hechingen consortium acquired a poorly managed cement factory in Hamburg. Ernst naturally did not intend to engage in cement production in Germany. Now the German cement industry is already very involved, and the profits are not too high. , and the Hechingen Consortium does not have any large-scale minerals in Europe to support these traditional industries.

Moreover, none of the traditional industrial giants could be compared to Ernst, so Hechingen made its fortune in light industry and relatively cutting-edge technology fields.

Currently, many electric power companies and companies engaged in technological research and development in Germany are backed by investments from the Hechingen Bank. These are the future cows of the Hechingen consortium.

After acquiring the cement plant, the equipment and people were transported directly from the port of Hamburg to East Africa on its own ships.

Second-hand, the loss caused the boss to rush to sell, so the price was very cheap, and the employees of the cement factory were directly sent to East Africa by Ernst in the name of aid.

If they were allowed to stay in East Africa, these workers would definitely not work, so Ernst used a method of high salary and dispatch to let them go to East Africa to guide the construction of cement plants.

The first cement plant was located in Dar es Salaam. Sea transportation from Hamburg to Dar es Salaam was quite convenient, and it was also convenient for shipment.

Next, Ernst plans to build a cement factory in several important cities in East Africa. The first ones selected are Mombasa, Dodoma, Mbeya, Kisumu, and Songea.

Cities in East Africa, or small towns to be precise, are completely underpopulated, and ordinary people have no use for them. Houses built in traditional ways are very good, at least for now.

The investment is about 50,000 pounds. This amount of money is really very small, because East Africa does not use that much. Cement is mainly used in special road sections and cities in East Africa, so the scale of the subsequent cement plants is not even as large as that of Dar es Sahara. Ram size.

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Dar es Salaam.

The first cement factory in East Africa is under construction. Before the machinery and equipment are sent to East Africa, the staff in Dar es Salaam received the news via telegraph.

This cement factory would become the largest cement production plant in the current East African colonies and would remain so for some time.

Because it must be put into production as soon as possible to meet the needs of the East African colonies as much as possible, the scale cannot be small.

A few more factories will be built later, and they will be built in order to reduce transportation costs. If the East African colonies can solve the transportation problem, there is actually no big problem whether to build them or not.

The most indispensable thing in East Africa is manpower. When developing northern Kenya, the East African colonies captured a large number of tribal people to supplement the labor force. Therefore, during the northwest battlefield, East Africa did not capture the indigenous people in the northwest, but drove them all out.