Note e memorie sull'oceano Indiano (XVIII-XIX secolo) seconda parte

[Autom. eng. transl.] At the turn of the eighteenth century the Napoleonic desires and plans to invade India to annihilate Great Britain which resulted in the Egyptian campaign, in the sending of French consular missions to the court of the Shah of Persia Fath Ali Qajar and, finally, in contacts with the monarchies on the northwestern borders of British India and with the rulers of Maskat, they represented the beginning of a defensive strategy on the part of Great Britain, never before threatened in its way to India by a European power . The weakness of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Persia as a defensive bulwark forced the British to take immediate action; this gave birth to the extreme and urgent need to find out what there was in those mysterious lands and, above all, to verify if a European army, naturally French, had been able to invade India by land, crossing the Makran. Only in the face of a European crisis the distressing absence of cartographic and topographical documentation concerning the Makran region was the object of concern and tension on the part of the political-military class of the Anglo-Indian government. The representatives of the Anglo-Indian empire were also aware of the fundamental truth that the European force in the East was actually a fragile thing, everything depended on the naval power of Great Britain and that the English element present in the garrisons of the three main agencies of the company, Bengal, Madras and Bombay, it was small, weak and dependent in terms of logistic-military effectiveness from the support of local troops; in Britain, India and the security of its northwestern borders had become an object and source of intense political disputes.