Steamship lines gradually developed across the Indian Ocean maritime region in the course of the 1860s. A handful of shipping companies flourished there with the assistance of government contracts and the shelter provided by the great bulk of the African continent from the more competitive commercial steamshipping conditions to be found European and North Atlantic waters. On the long, deep-sea routes from Suez and Aden to India, Australia and the Far East, the P&O company was pre-eminent. This ‘flagship’ of British imperialism in the East, was joined from 1861 by a French counterpart, Messageries Impériales, whose steamship lines from Marseilles to Alexandria and from Suez to Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong and Yokohama expressed the all the aspirations and elegance of Napoleon III's Empire. The British and French rivals manoeuvred around each other for passenger traffic and for the fine freights – silks, raw silk, opium, bullion and specie – which were the perfect accompaniment for inter-continental mail liners. Meanwhile, on the margins of the Indian Ocean – on rivers, along coasts, and between islands – smaller and less glamorous steamship lines emerged to conduct, on a smalller scale and with more regard to local economic conditions, the same mix of mails, passengers and relatively high value cargo as was being carried by the premier deep-sea shipping firms. Among these short-sea ‘cousins’, the largest and most influential was easily the British India S.N. Co.

William Mackinnon and James Macalister Hall, and the family interests which controlled BI, were not content with the contracts signed with the Government of India in 1862–4. Alive now to the strategic as well as commercial significance of steamship lines, they were on the constant look out for additional ‘country’ routes within the Indian Ocean maritime region – that is, for the purposes of international commerce conducted over longer distances than the domestic coasting trades of British India. What had been achieved with BI's ‘country’ or ‘intra-Asian’ services to Singapore and Basra could conceivably be replicated on other maritime routes. Any development of new lines in the Indian Ocean, however, was subject to two principal constraints. The first was the willingness of the Government of India, or any other local government in the region, to put up cash for regular steam services over particular routes.