A book that ranges as widely as this over time and space throws up innumerable dilemmas about names of people and places – questions that are actually deeply political in nature, as anyone who uses the old colonial name Bombay instead of Mumbai in the British-built port city will very quickly find out. Romanizing Islamic names necessitates a hard choice between at least three major demotic traditions: Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In the end I decided to use names I thought would be most familiar to readers who read predominantly in English. Hence, I opted for Sun Yat-sen, using the older Wade-Giles system of Romanizing Chinese names, rather than the Pinyin version Sun Yixian. This still leaves some room for debate about whether Zhou Enlai, which I use, is better known than Chou En-lai. And I use Beijing as well as Peking. Consistency in these matters, I discovered, was hard to achieve. I hope that readers will forgive my more eccentric choices.