One aspect of both modernization and nationalism is to change names that have long been used in a way now regarded as derogatory, false, not properly indicative of the values of the new society, or simply out of date as new forms of transliteration replace old in the West.
Instances abound throughout this chapter. The great capital city of China, long known as Peking (and so referred to here), is now Beijing (and will be so called in subsequent chapters) because of the modernization of methods for transliterating Chinese characters and their sounds into English. Persia is now officially Iran, though it is nonetheless still correct to refer to the citizens of Iran as Persians, for one is used as a noun and the other as an adjective.
Thus not only in changing place names, but in their pronunciation, in the creation of titles, in the translation of phrases, history shows its biases and is quickly dated. Even in so apparently simple a matter as the pronunciation of the former British East African colony of Kenya lurks the sound of historical transition, since before independence the colony was pronounced “keen-ya,” while the independent nation was properly pronounced “ken-ya.” Historians must observe these distinctions if they are to be true to the time they describe.
