The revised text of the Charles Beckingham Memorial Lecture, Ibn Battūta and the Mongols, delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society on 13th January 2000 by D. O. Morgan.

The article details the events and themes surrounding a strike and riot that transpired in colonial Bombay in 1832, led by a segment of the Parsi community and joined by other Indians, in reaction to the British cull of stray pariah dogs in the streets. The strike and riot demonstrated the commercial power of the Parsis to disrupt the daily routine of Bombay and exert their influence in hostility to colonial interference and incursions against Parsi (Indian) religious sensibilities. The Bombay dog riots of 1832 exposed the vulnerability of early British-Indian socio-political relations in Bombay and Western India in the face of popular disturbances against British authority and was in marked contrast to the state of Parsi-British relations that developed in the nineteenth century, as the Parsis led the process of Indian accommodation to British rule, tempered only by overt threats to their religious identity.

The campaign against thuggee in 1830s India produced a set of widely-circulated accounts of the origins and practices of thugs. In these works (both popular and scholarly), a very small amount of primary information was continually recycled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The changes visible in the manner of deployment of this information are indicative of progressive re-formulations of the narrative of the history of thuggee, and the larger history of British India. This process is examined through a study of the incorporation of an extract from The Travels of M de Thévenot into the Levant into the historical archive, which concludes that any re-appraisal of history must incorporate a consideration of the narrative underlying the production of the records, as well as the records themselves.

The previously unpublished text of a letter written by John Osterwick in Hirado to Richard Fursland, President of the Council of Defence, around the end of September 1621. Its value lies in the detail which it provides of the state of the English East India Company's factory in Japan, eight years after it was established and two years before it closed.