Writing in Bombay around 1890, the colonial administrator James Douglas recounted tales of former times, when, far from hearth and home, spirits of the Anglo-Saxon dead warned friends and family of impending danger or rescue in supernatural ways that were strongly reminiscent of Muslim seaborne miracle stories heard in previous chapters. All such stories, and the anxieties that fed them, were products of circumstances that fed religious demand. But near the century's end Douglas was convinced that Bombay could no longer harbour such fantasies:

Like other Victorian champions of scientific progress and the rational utility of technology, Douglas saw in the industrializing city around him an arena of disenchantment, an urban workshop for the dismembering of old religions and customs. Such attitudes have weathered surprisingly well: Thompsonian Methodism and the occasional study of plebeian Liverpudlian séances aside, the nineteenth-century city continues to be policed by the historiographical heirs of Bentham and Weber.