Not everyone will agree with the view that the Pilgrimage is Burton's “outstanding contribution to travel literature”. What is beyond dispute is the unique place it occupies among his writings. Conscious of the significant part it played in her husband's life and career, Lady Burton placed it at the head of the Memorial edition of his works. “Although he has been the author of some eighty books and pamphlets”, she wrote, “I think that this original edition of three volumes is the one that his name should live by…” Just over thirty years later, it provided the starting-point for the Royal Asiatic Society's first Burton Memorial Lecture.

To undergraduates of Western origin, one of the most alien aspects of Islamic history is the role played in it by tribes: why did they never disappear ? To seasoned Islamicists, on the other hand, it is the virtual disappearance of tribes from Europe after the age of invasions that is puzzling: why are there no Ḥāshid and Bakīl in Switzerland ? Who could imagine the Yemeni highlands or the Caucasus as places renowned for banks and cuckoo clocks ? Though tribes were prominent in many parts of Asia, they did not play the same role in Chinese and Indian civilisation either as they did in the Muslim Middle East; nor is it obvious that they played the same role in the Middle East before the rise of Islam as they did thereafter. It is hardly surprising, then, that Islamicists talk so much about tribes that non-Islamicists often suffer from the misconception that there is nothing but tribes in the Islamic world.

Attempts to show that similarities between the religious cults of different places are due to a transmission of ideas often have little basis in fact: the similarities may be more apparent than real, and may be more convincingly explained by other factors. Nevertheless, there is strong, albeit not conclusive, evidence for the following suggestion of an example of cultural transmission from the Graeco-Roman world to India.

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed out that the English East India Company's objective in re-entering East Asian waters during the second half of the seventeenth century was the re-establishment of a direct trade with Japan from which the company had withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But, far from being an inconsequential historical footnote, the unintended consequence of this policy was the beginning of a direct trade with China, first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove of greater consequence to the company's fortunes than the chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It is within this context and that of the changing fortunes of the English company and its Dutch rival as well as the broader East Asian situation that the brief, and largely ignored, history of the company's factory on Taiwan is worth examining.