1866
Java, headquarters of EIC
For the past several years, the EIC had been purchasing armed and armored steam ships for their expanding navy. Having lost their pseudo-sovereign powers in portions of the Maratha Empire, this also meant that the Company was no longer constrained by the Peshwas and were allowed to act entirely in their own interests with few restrictions.
While the purchase of these steam ships were certainly expensive, the Company naturally found a way to make money by mothballing the arms and armor and use them as merchant ships until the demand for war was raised.
Cape Colony
For the past several years, the EIC had dispatched "ambassadors" and "emissaries" to the feuding tribal leaders of what had once been a unified Zulu Empire. Now assorted Zulu and affiliated (or once subordinate) Kings were engaging in on and off warfare with one another. The EIC employees would ensure their safety by providing assorted gifts to the local warlords, mainly trinkets which the tribal leaders had never seen. More importantly, the Company officials were present to gage the relatives strengths of each faction and how they related to one another. Perhaps more importantly, the officials were to investigate more thoroughly the initial reports of both diamonds and gold in the vast and dysfunctional Zulu domain.
Even the cursory checks would reveal the potential for a huge strike of various minerals as well as great agricultural possibilities. But it would take time for the Company to tap these resources and it was unlikely the chaotic political situation in Zululand (as was the unofficial exonym) would allow for this.
Thus, the Company officials would review the data and make alliances based upon what best served them. As many of the lands now controlled by the Zulu and other tribes were controlled by those most adjacent to the expanding Jewish settlements, the Company would determine to make allies with the enemies of these tribes, those further east which did not necessarily have anything the Company wanted.
Soon this would be discovered and several tribal leaders proved predictably livid. But the EIC army, augmented by Dutch, Jewish and native allies, were already marching east in response to a series of petty "offenses" by the inhabitants of the region.
Zanzibar
Though Muslim power had been felt along Eastern Africa for nearly a thousand years, the EIC has managed to evict the Omani Dynasty from the island of Zanzibar with relative east. With the company ascendance to power, a wave of Christian missionaries were funded by the Company and sent into the interior. This was considered an odd decision for a profit-motivated entity. However, the Arabs had long been loathed by the local tribes for having sustained the slave-trade (something the Company halted) thus the assorted Christian missionaries proved popular on the East African mainland in many areas. In this case, Christianity was a tool used against the Musselmen. In other cases, the Company would have been perfectly happy using Islam against Christian enemies.
Once in control, the Company would ally with various tribes to exploit the agricultural bounty of the region in production of crops like groundnuts, fruits and, most profitably, coffee. The Company had already partnered with the Ethiopian King and dominated the African coffee trade. Expansion south would prove a reliable profit maker as well as creating yet another source of manpower for the EIC forces.
Assorted tribes would happily allow their warriors to join the Company army believing, what would turn out to be correctly, that these forces would largely be used to crush regional enemies if and when that time came.
By 1866, a regiment of Kikuyu, perhaps the most powerful of the many tribes in the region of East Africa controlled by the Company, would sail for Southern Africa under command of Company soldiers including several Black and Asian senior officers.
The baffling array of races, nationalities and languages affiliated with the company would often cause problems as the EIC had no "lingua franca". The Company had long been a multi-ethnic group even before the conglomeration of the Dutch East India, French East India, British East India, Swedish East India and other companies into a defacto sovereign nation focused on India but having fully sovereign control over Eastern islands like Java and Sumatra.
While Dutch remained the common tongue in Java and Sumatra, the Company officials tended to speak French or English in India and were similarly fluid by situation. In southern Africa, Dutch was commonly used by default among the bureaucrats assigned to the Dutch Cape Colony. However, by 1866, Yiddish and Polish was used more often to the east and, of course, the assorted African languages were used in tribal areas.
Large numbers of Javan, Maratha (usually Christians from India), Americans, now Bantu-speaking Kikuyu and other forces comprised Company forces in southern Africa augmented by Dutch Cape forces and Yiddish-speaking Jewish settlers evicted from Poland. Even an Ethiopian regiment arrived armed with the latest rifles.
By 1867, this bizarre conglomerate of soldiers were being readied for a large-scale warfare against several tribal nations to the east who had what the company wanted.
The Congo
Throughout the 1860's, the Congo would remain quietly profitable as the rubber, palm oil, cotton and other crops would become more and more lucrative. Eventually cotton was dropped as a major crop as rubber and palm oil prices rose. Demand was high throughout the world and simply could not be satiated.
Any resistance stamped out brutally.
John Rowlands, promoted again and now controlling nearly a quarter of the Company claims, would dispatch his militia and police to slaughter any village which refused or failed to heed the corvee of labor.
While somewhat embittered that his old friend and mentor (who turned out to be the American would-be regicide Armstrong Hyman Thruston) had been forced into the jungle by American political vendetta, Rowlands knew that the Company did what it had to do. Rowlands DID, however, take greater pleasure in hunting down and slaughtering the cannibals who killed him and even received international praise for wiping out these peoples. Now matter how unpopular Thruston was, killing and eating people, especially Europeans, could not be allowed.
Despite controlling the most remote inland series of plantations, Rowlands received a reputation as a high performing executive destined for greater things.
To continue along this career trajectory, Rowlands would brutally crush any dissent, killing at will. Every able-bodied African was expected to support the company policy of maximizing production. There was to be no exception anywhere.