 Beginning in the 17th century, the East India Company brought over thousands of South Asian scholars, "lascars", and other workers (who were mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) to England, some of whom settled down and took local European wives, due to a lack of Asian women in the British Isles at the time.Due to the majority of early Asian immigrants being "lascars", the earliest Asian communities were found in port towns.Naval cooks also came, many of them from the Sylhet Division of what is now Bangladesh.