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In 1775, after having fallen foul of the British East India Company, William Bolts offered his services to the Imperial government of Austria, putting forward a proposal for re-establishing Austrian trade with India from the Adriatic port of Trieste. His proposal was accepted by the government of Empress Maria Theresa, and on 24 September 1776, Bolts sailed from Leghorn (today's Livorno) in the dominions of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, the younger son of the Empress, to India in command of a ship under the Imperial flag, the former Indiaman Earl of Lincoln, renamed the Giuseppe e Teresa. He took with him a ten-year charter, authorising him to trade under Imperial colours between Austria’s Adriatic ports and Persia, India, China and Africa, and from Africa and Madagascar to America.

Having passed through Delagoa Bay in 1773, and spotted an opportunity, Bolts returned to raise the flag of the Holy Roman Empire, and established a factory there as a base for "country trade" between East Africa and ports on the Malabar coast of India. During his voyage out, he obtained Brazilian cochineal beetles at Rio de Janeiro and transported them to Delagoa Bay, thereby predating the introduction to Bengal of this insect, for use in the making of scarlet dyes and carmine. Representing his newly founded Trieste Company, he built two small forts, St. Joseph and St. Maria, which were maintained for four years, until Bolts' dispute with his Belgian financial backers, Charles Proli and his associates, led to the loss of his capital, forcing them to abandon these forts and return to solely onboard trading.

By then, trade had grown significantly: ships from Bombay, Surat, Kannur and Madras frequently arrived with Gujarati textiles and left the bay with ivory (with the factory, composed of 155 men and a number of women, exporting as much 75,000 pounds of it per year), usually stopping in Madagascar to purchase slaves, before returning to India. But in April 1781, having taken issue with the encroachment on their claimed territory, and with the forts protecting the settlement having been abandoned, the Portuguese seized the opportunity and sent five ships, including a 40-gun frigate, and 500 men, from Goa to force the Austrians out; taking any remaining Trieste Company people as prisoners, seizing their two anchored ships, and demolishing their buildings. The Portuguese immediately established a garrison and built a fort to prevent the Austrians or British from re-establishing a presence there, around which the presidio of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) would be established (in the 1850s, after the earlier Portuguese settlement was ransacked and entirely destroyed by the Zulu Kingdom in 1833).

So then, what if those forts had been maintained and garrisoned, and in absence of the Portuguese attack, the settlement established by Bolts on the site of what would IOTL later become Maputo had remained in the hands of the Habsburgs, later the Austrian Empire? From this POD, ITTL, how large and significant might Austria's colonies in Africa have potentially become?
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