It is a common statement of writers of Cambodian and Siamese history that the Siamese overran Cambodia and captured Angkor Thom on one or more occasions before the final sack of that capital in 1430–31. The dates on which this event is said to have occurred are variously given as 1350–53, 1372–73, 1384–85, 1388, 1393–94, 1408, 1420–21. As authority, these writers can cite almost any of the common versions of the Cambodian chronicle and some versions of the Annals of Ayuthia (Siam).

China occupies an important place in the Islamic world, but Islam in China is perhaps one of the most neglected and unexplored subjects in both sinological and Islamic studies. While there is abundant literature on Islam in the Near East, India, the East Indies, and Africa, we know few authorities on the subject of Islam in China, e.g., d'Ollone, Thierssant, Broomhall, Bonin, Hartmann, etc. Even in such comprehensive works as the Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics, the Encyclopaedia of the social sciences, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and R. Levy's Sociology of Islam, we find merely fragmentary descriptions regarding the subject.

The United States government in the closing days of the European war initiated what seems a unique venture in war history: to dissect the war anatomies of major enemy countries and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses on the basis of enemy data and interviews. The diagnoses, while primarily to trace the effects of strategic bombing upon enemy war potentials, were also to serve as a means of checking United States techniques of estimating enemy war potentials. Accordingly, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey was formed and, hard on the heels of occupying troops, corps of economists, engineers, and military technicians descended upon the remains of the German and Japanese economies for their autopsies. The results of their work have been incorporated in a series of technical papers and two major reports of particular interest to economists, published by the Over-all Economic Effects Division of the Survey.