The moment he heard news of Luskan's movements, Li Wei had almost immediately seen through their objective. At the same time, he could not help sighing. This world, too, was never short of ambitious men who had glimpsed the tide of the coming Age of Sail and begun preparing for it well in advance.
Perhaps no one in this world understood better than Li Wei—who had come from another world and was familiar with the background of a similar era—what it meant to command sea power in this age, and all that lay behind it.
It could be said that whoever controlled maritime trade routes controlled the right to develop new colonies, and would also accelerate the transformation of society itself.
How had the Eagle Nation of Blue Star risen from behind to become the so-called empire on which the sun never set?
The fundamental reason was that it had won the Seven Years' War in the struggle for colonies and global colonial hegemony, becoming the world's most powerful colonial empire in one stroke. It established a bourgeois parliamentary system that stood a step ahead of feudalism at the time, consolidated its primitive capital through overseas colonial expansion and trade, gained vast numbers of cheap laborers through the Enclosure Movement, and obtained immense quantities of precious metals, coal, and iron through colonial plunder. Meanwhile, its domestic manufacturing workshops had already accumulated sufficient technology, while its overseas colonies provided a colossal market of boundless potential.
All of it gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and turned the Eagle Nation into the "workshop of the world" at the time.
Yet after this former world hegemon lost its edge in industrial technology following World War II, it failed to adjust its economic structure in time. Its massive capital exports made London the world's