To understand Negapatam in 1781, you have to hold several conflicts in your head at once. France had entered the American War of Independence in 1778, and Britain responded by seizing French colonial outposts in India, including the port of Mahe on the west coast in 1779. That seizure enraged Hyder Ali, the de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, who considered Mahe to be under his protection. He launched the Second Anglo-Mysore War, his armies threatening Madras itself. Meanwhile, in December 1780, Britain declared war on the Dutch Republic for trafficking arms to the French and American rebels. The news filtered slowly across oceans. By the monsoon season of 1781, the British and Mysoreans were locked in a stalemate on India's east coast, and the Dutch outposts along the Coromandel Coast became a new theater in a war that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

Van Vlissingen's predicament captured the absurdity of colonial power in India. Before learning of the war with Britain, he had been dealing with Hyder Ali's forces raiding villages near Negapatam. When he sent envoys to Hyder's camp at Tanjore to demand compensation, Hyder refused to release them and threatened Dutch outposts at Pulicat and Sadras instead. Van Vlissingen had to pay ransom to get his own diplomats back. During these humiliations, General Eyre Coote, the British commander at Madras, offered the Dutch assistance -- a gesture that became ironic when Britain declared war. When van Vlissingen finally confirmed the war declaration in June 1781, he immediately negotiated an alliance with the same Hyder Ali who had been extorting him months earlier. The agreement was reached on July 29, though not formally ratified until September 4. Such was the pace of colonial diplomacy: yesterday's extortionist became today's ally because the alternative was worse.

Lord Macartney, the newly arrived governor of Madras, organized the British assault while General Coote protested that troops were needed against Hyder Ali. Macartney enlisted Hector Munro, an officer about to retire to England, and convinced Colonel John Braithwaite to release his forces for the attack. Colonel Eccles Nixon's troops marched south, seizing the Dutch outpost at Karikal on October 20 and Nagore the following day. Admiral Sir Edward Hughes's fleet delivered Munro and the main force that same day. The garrison inside Negapatam's walls consisted of 500 European troops, 5,500 local troops, and 2,000 Mysorean soldiers -- on paper, a larger force than the British. In practice, the local and Mysorean troops proved unreliable. Dutch reports record that most of the Mysorean cavalry fled during the initial engagement, and two Dutch sorties failed to break the siege. Hyder Ali sent reinforcements in waves, but Munro attacked each before they were prepared, forcing retreats. The third wave arrived on November 13 only to discover that the town had surrendered the previous day.

The capitulation was finalized on November 12, 1781, and the garrison surrendered. Britain went on to capture Trincomalee in Ceylon and other Dutch possessions across India. When the wars finally ended in 1784, the British returned everything to the Dutch -- everything except Negapatam. The port that two European empires had fought over remained in British hands, one more piece of Indian territory absorbed into a growing colonial empire. The people of Negapatam -- whose ancestors had traded along the Coromandel Coast long before any European ship appeared on the horizon -- had no voice in any of these negotiations. Hector Munro, the British officer who conducted the siege, retired to Scotland and commemorated his victory by building the Fyrish Monument in Easter Ross, designed to resemble the gate of Negapatam. A monument to colonial conquest, built in the Scottish Highlands, memorializing a battle fought on Indian soil between European powers -- it captures the strange, displaced nature of this entire episode.