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By Root 711 0

with the English. It may be that the relative success of Britain in the Seven Years War (1756–63) marks the beginning of their dominance: certainly in the Indian Ocean this was the period when the British began the long process of conquering India and taking over important choke points. The Dutch meanwhile were much reduced by the financial problems of the VOC. They lost the Cape colony to Britain at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and then turned more to the internal development of Indonesia. As part of this, in the nineteenth century they slowly took over large numbers of these scattered islands, and especially in Java intensified forced agricultural production. Meanwhile the French sought compensation in Indo-China, establishing a sizeable colonial presence there during the nineteenth century. The islands of the ocean also changed hands in this period, a matter we will come to presently. The Portuguese were reduced to operating for a time in the entrails of the British system, making good money from the opium trade in the early nineteenth century. Goa endured an occupation by British forces during the Napoleonic wars.

The central fact was British dominance of the ocean, and indeed of oceanic matters worldwide for a time. In 1890 sixty-three per cent of the world's combined ship tonnage sailed under the British flag. By late in the eighteenth century this industrialising country had major centres in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Penang, and beyond the edge of the ocean in Sydney. Over the next fifty years a series of vital ports were taken or created: Colombo in 1796, Cape Town in 1806, Singapore in 1819, Aden in 1839, and beyond the ocean, Hong Kong in 1842. So unchallenged was Britain in the Indian Ocean that they needed little force to ensure their control, as compared with what was needed in more contested oceans. At the height of imperialism, in 1914, the Royal Navy had 39 ships in commission in the Atlantic, 43 in the Pacific, but needed only 12 in the Indian Ocean.1

This British dominance characterised the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and some way into the twentieth. In the next chapter we will see a reassertion of littoral Indian Ocean states in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Two small specific examples will begin to introduce the matter of British superiority. One is to see how European latecomers had perforce to operate in the interstices of the British system. In the early nineteenth century the various German states were left only with the crumbs, such as Siam, Zanzibar and Turkey. In 1846–48 a ship from the great port of Hamburg wandered the ocean looking for openings. It visited the Amirantes, the Seychelles, the Comoros, Massawa, Jiddah, Hodeida, Aden and Zanzibar, all to little effect. Things improved only after Germany was united, and acquired colonies in East Africa and the Pacific; these opened opportunities through and in the Indian Ocean.2 British dominance also acted to the detriment of those areas which remained independent for a time. For example, around 1800 Zanzibar could play off the British and the French, both of whom had a presence in East Africa and the islands. But once Britain had defeated France to end the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the sultans had no choice but to become staunch, and subordinate, allies of the British. Zanzibar's sultans had to tailor their policies to suit their de facto masters.

This dominance in material and military matters often flowed over into a belief in cultural and moral superiority. English writers were quite open in their expressions of superiority over and, as the inverse, contempt for the natives, often coupled with a desire to uplift them. Mrs Tompsitt visited Colombo in 1884: 'The poor peoples' huts seem to be very devoid of what we should consider necessaries. They all sit and take their meals on the ground, yet they look good-tempered and happy. I expect what little cultivation and refinement they show is owing to contact with and the example of the English.'3

So also in high policy matters. George Curzon, whose rotund