The preferred term for all manner of artillery or bastion-trace fortifications in the historiography seems to be the “Trace Italienne.” But this is not a term that I have found in use anywhere in the sources. By the second half of the eighteenth century Dutch students of military engineering could not even say where exactly the bastion had originated. One anonymous student, despite naming many early Italian examples of bastions, said that some thought the bastion had originated in Bohemia, but that others argued for a Turkish origin. The phrase “Trace Italienne” is unfortunate for another reason. I have argued in chapter one that fortification design was highly dynamic and that the invention of the bastion was only the beginning of a development. It does not seem useful to refer to a fortification design by Coehoorn or Vauban by the name Trace Italienne, when there was a world of difference between the first Italian bastions and these later designs. Instead, I have used either “bastion trace” or the more generic “artillery fortification,” since not all types of designs actually used bastions to begin with.

Another issue is geographic names, I have predominantly opted for the modern usage (so Chowghat and not Chettua), with a few exceptions where use of the modern name seemed illogical (Batavia, not Jakarta; Madras, not Chennai). Finally, a word on illustrations. A work on fortification design is not complete without illustrations. Since the process of design itself was always a matter of integrating text and image, the analysis and description of these designs, of the development of design, and of the debates on designs must also integrate text and image. In some instances, an image really can convey more than 1,000 words. The output of the Company's engineers is housed in a number of collections, the most important being the National Archives in The Hague and the Leiden University Bodel Nijenhuis collection, but also including the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, and abroad the Bibliothèque National de France and of course the remaining Company archives in Jakarta, Colombo, and Chennai. The collections of the National Archives of the UK in Kew and the British Library also containe maps immediately post-dating the Dutch period.