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consistently for such proper nouns as ‘Earth’ and ‘King’. Hyphens have been deleted from noun phrases like ‘made-road’ and ‘sailing-ship’, and in others like ‘today’, ‘psycho-analysis’ and ‘preoccupied’ the two parts have been combined into one word. The accent has been removed from ‘rôle’. ‘Blonde’ has been changed to ‘blond’ as a descriptive word for a racial type and ‘brunette’ to ‘brunet’. The use of commas, italics, colons and semi-colons has been checked and made consistent. Commas have also been removed from dates such as ‘October, 1864’ and rationalized on the rare occasions when they might be in danger of impeding sense. Full stops have been removed from the abbreviations ‘St.’, ‘Dr.’, ‘ B.C. ’ and ‘ A.D .’. Single quotation marks have been substituted for doubles, with doubles employed inside singles. Chapter numbers have been changed from Roman to Arabic numerals.
    Incidental spellings have generally been brought into line with house usage: for example, ‘centring’ rather than ‘centering,’ ‘Moslem’ for ‘Moslim’ and ‘judgement’ for ‘judgment’. However, some idiosyncratic spellings which are particularly characteristic of Wells have been retained, e.g. ‘burthen’. His versions of place-names have also been retained on the grounds that they are intelligible to English-speakers, whereas more recent official names are sometimes unfamiliar or subject to continuing change. The one exception to this policy on place names is the potentially confusing spelling ‘Buda-Pesth’, recorded in the list below of single emendations.
    The sources of these emendations are indicated by date.
    1924 = Labour Publishing Co., 1924, which conveniently brings together early corrections to the text
    1929 = the first Thinker's Library edition, Watts, 1929
    1941 = Watts, 1941, revised by Wells
    1965 = Collins, 1965, revised by Raymond Postgate and G. P. Wells.
    The remaining emendations are the editor's own.
Page:line
Reading adopted
Reading rejected
3:4
The World in Space (1924)
The World of Space
12:4
million (1929)
millions
12:13
2,793 (1924)
1,793
12:24
175 yards (1965)
175 feet
15:35
upon
up on
33:20
Another thing (1929)
And another thing
45:5
were very (1941)
was very
48:23
‘in Asia or Africa’ (1965)
in Asia or Africa
59:3
Elliot Smith
Eliot Smith
70:34
gypsies (1929)
gipsies
84:12
sort of men (1924)
sort of man
116:3
eastern
western
146:16
Gauls (1965)
Goths
244:26
Budapest (1929)
Buda-Pesth
295:7
'thirties and 'forties
thirties and forties
    It seems that the original manuscript and proofs of the Short History no longer exist. The Special Collections Library at the University of Illinois preserves instead what appears to be an ongoing manuscript of the Short History , made up of several hundred pages of holograph, typescript, and mixed holograph and corrected typescript, containing material from several editions of the book.
    The present edition is the first critical edition of the Short History . Any errors and flaws are therefore solely the responsibility of the present editor.
    I would like to thank the many people who have given me their help in preparing this edition, especially Sylvia Hardy, Patrick Parrinder, Ian and Janice Stanley, Lindeth Vasey, Sally Boyles and the staff of the London Borough of Bromley Local Studies Library.
    Michael Sherborne

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

PREFACE
    This Short History of the World is meant to be read straight-forwardly almost as a novel is read. It gives in the most general way an account of our present knowledge of history, shorn of elaborations and complications. It has been amply illustrated, and everything has been done to make it vivid and clear. From it the reader should be able to get that general view of history which is so