Not everyone will agree with the view that thePilgrimage is Burton's“outstanding contribution to travel literature”.What is beyond dispute is the unique place itoccupies among his writings. Conscious of thesignificant part it played in her husband's life andcareer, Lady Burton placed it at the head of theMemorial edition of his works. “Although he has beenthe author of some eighty books and pamphlets”, shewrote, “I think that this original edition of threevolumes is the one that his name should live by…”Just over thirty years later, it provided thestarting-point for the Royal Asiatic Society's firstBurton Memorial Lecture.

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the mostalien aspects of Islamic history is the role playedin it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? Toseasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is thevirtual disappearance of tribes from Europe afterthe age of invasions that is puzzling: why are thereno Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who couldimagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus asplaces renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Thoughtribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, theydid not play the same role in Chinese and Indiancivilisation either as they did in the Muslim MiddleEast; nor is it obvious that they played the samerole in the Middle East before the rise of Islam asthey did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then,that Islamicists talk so much about tribes thatnon-Islamicists often suffer from the misconceptionthat there is nothing but tribes in the Islamicworld.

Attempts to show that similarities between thereligious cults of different places are due to atransmission of ideas often have little basis infact: the similarities may be more apparent thanreal, and may be more convincingly explained byother factors. Nevertheless, there is strong, albeitnot conclusive, evidence for the followingsuggestion of an example of cultural transmissionfrom the Graeco-Roman world to India.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed outthat the English East India Company's objective inre-entering East Asian waters during the second halfof the seventeenth century was the re-establishmentof a direct trade with Japan from which the companyhad withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But,far from being an inconsequential historicalfootnote, the unintended consequence of this policywas the beginning of a direct trade with China,first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove ofgreater consequence to the company's fortunes thanthe chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It iswithin this context and that of the changingfortunes of the English company and its Dutch rivalas well as the broader East Asian situation that thebrief, and largely ignored, history of the company'sfactory on Taiwan is worth examining.