This book has been very long in the writing, and I have accumulated many debts as I have written it. While working on it, I had positions in history departments at Macquarie University and San Diego State University, and I want to thank both departments and universities for providing friendly and collegial environments, for granting periods of sabbatical leave, and for financial support during research trips and trips to conferences. Colleagues in both universities offered innumerable suggestions, ideas, insights, and references. I also want to thank librarians at both universities for their help in finding and ordering books. I spent productive periods of research leave at the Kluge Institute of the Library of Congress, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the library of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies and the British Library in London, the Russian State Library (former Lenin Library) in Moscow, the Widener Library at Harvard, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University in Canberra. I also received a generous grant from the Australian Research Council in 2010; that gave me the time, travel, and resources needed to finish this huge project.
I owe too many debts to too many colleagues to list all individually, but I do want to thank some whose conversations over the years have provided unexpected and valuable insights. They include (in alphabetical order) Tom Allsen, Richard Bosworth, Terry Burke, Nick Doumanis, Ross Dunn, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Steven Fortescue, Graeme Gill, Geoffrey Hosking, Sasha Pavkovic, Daniel Waugh, Stephen Wheatcroft, and many, many others.
Bob Moore commissioned this entire project, and has kept a kindly eye on it over a much longer period than I care to remember. He has been immensely patient, supportive, and encouraging. I grew up in Nigeria, where my first, and perhaps best, teacher was my mother, Carol. Chardi, Joshua, and Emily have put up with this project, and the absences and research trips it involved, over many years, with love and generosity. I owe my family an immense debt for their love and support. I also want to thank my extremely able and conscientious research assistants, Mandy Kretzschmar and Lana Nadj, who helped with bibliographical research and ensured some consistency in the spelling of words and names in many different languages. My editors at Wiley Blackwell, Haze Humbert, Fiona Screen, and Brigitte Lee Messenger, did a superb job of ensuring stylistic consistency in a complex manuscript.
I alone am responsible for remaining errors of fact, emphasis, and logic, and for not managing to cover all of the rich scholarship on the vast territory traversed by this book.