In the mid-1790s, Great Britain's colonies in India were largely limited to widely separated coastal enclaves, where the East India Company (EIC) conducted trade while protected by its own armed forces. These were mainly composed of 'native' battalions, locally recruited officers and men with a smattering of white European officers in command. A small number of EIC battalions were made up of white European soldiers, many of them central European mercenaries.
The main British enclaves were the three 'Presidencies' in Madras, Bombay and Bengal. Each had their own governor and was largely independent of the others, although all came under the higher direction of the governor general. With commercial profit their main aim, the EIC's troops were subject to various cost-cutting policies, such as officers often holding relatively low ranks for their actual command duties (battalions being run by majors rather than lieutenant colonels, for example), and a ban on training with live ammunition.
Although Britain's footprint in India was small, it was slowly growing and there had been a series of wars against the other major powers in the south of the sub-continent, including the Maratha Confederacy and Mysore. The Marathas had been defeated after a long war in 1782, but had themselves defeated the forces of Hyderabad in 1795. This led the Nizam of Hyderabad to sign an alliance with the EIC, and this in turn gave the British a strong ally to the north of their other major threat - Mysore.
Mysore covered a huge area on the western side of southern India. It was protected on either side by two north-south running mountain ranges, the Western and Eastern Ghauts. Mysore's leader, Tipu Sultan, hated the British passionately and was developing dose ties to Britain's European enemy, Revolutionary France. Mysore had fought three wars with the EIC already. In the First Mysore War (1766-69) Tipu's father, Hyder
