‘The Key to India’: Troop Movements, Southern Africa, and Britain's Indian Ocean World, 1795–1820

Abstract

Movements of people, goods, and ideas across the oceans of the world were the means by which British interests were cemented. This article focuses on one of those strategic and military transoceanic networks. It examines the pivotal role played by the Cape of Good Hope in supplying Britain's Indian Empire with troops: either recruited from existing garrisons or transferred in the case of security emergencies. Tracing the arcs of these connections, and understanding how and why they operated, helps to situate British networks of influence and interest in the Indian Ocean region. The views of people like Richard Wellesley and Robert Percival illuminate the political impulses and strategic considerations that circulated immediately before and after the British acquisition of the Cape. The evidence presented here contributes to our understanding of how the Cape fits into British Indian Ocean networks. In describing the close connection between the Cape and India, the article disrupts models of imperial networks that focus exclusively on London's relationship with colonial peripheries. And, finally, the article illustrates what it meant, in practice, to exert control and to sustain transoceanic networks and connections in the Indian Ocean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.