ABSTRACT
IT was trade which first brought the English to the Persian Gulf and into the Tigris and Euphrates valleys,l as it had first taken them to India, China and Japan. In 1616, the East India Company, hoping to find new markets for its woollen cloth, no longer a novelty in India, dispatched the James under the terms of the three farmans' obtained by Richard Steele and John Crowther from Shah Abbas in September, 1615,3 to Jask, just outside the Clarence Straits. A few years later, 1619, the monopoly of the silk trade through the Persian Gulf was granted to the Company' by Shah Abbas.
