ABSTRACT
The restoration regime was primarily navalist, but there was a military side to its imperialism. Despite the pathetic nature of the early history of the Bombay garrison, it was a crucial precedent, for Charles II was committed by the treaty with Portugal to a garrison of 500 in Bombay, to protect local Roman Catholics. Sir George Oxenden, who had been knighted by Charles II in 1661 and appointed in 1662 president of the East India Company council in Surat, had in 1663 experienced the trauma of a plundering attack on that principal trading centre in Gujerat. The disintegration of Anglo-French relations at local level in India was always a possibility. The French state was much more willing to commit military resources to India than the British, so it was creditable that the British in Cuddalore, one of their Goromandel settlements south of Madras, fought off a French attempt to seize the town.
