This book is the fourth and final collection of Professor R.B. Serjeant's articles on the trade, commerce and society of South Arabia and the Yemen. The early articles concern trade; customary law is the next subject represented with social history and one or two incidental articles completing the volume.

Contents: Introduction; Yemeni merchants and trade in Yemen, 13th-16th centuries; The Hadrami network; The Yemeni coast in 1005/1597: an anonymous note on the flyleaf of Ibn al-Majawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir; 15th- century 'interlopers' on the coast of Rasulid Yemen; The customary law of south-west Arabia and Bedouin justice in Jordan; Customary law documents as a source of history; Sunnah, Qur'an, 'Urf; The Fatimi - Taiyibi (Isma'i li) Da'wah. Ideologies and community; Société et gouvernement en Arabie du Sud; The Zaydi tribes of the Yemen: a new field study; Wards and quarters of towns in south-west Arabia; Zina, some forms of marriage and allied topics in Western Arabia; The Yemen poet Al-Zubayri and his polemic against Zaydi imams; Islam; A fortified tower-house in Wadi Jirdan (Wahidi Sultanate) - I & II; Tihamah notes; The coastal population of Socotra; Two 16th-century Arabian geographical works; Index.