Acknowledgements

Some books begin being written by accident. This book certainly did, but it was a happy accident. It began with one of those lucky dips in the archives that historians need here and there. Yet at times these come unexpectedly. Working on the early Esperanto language community from a transnational perspective, Bernhard Struck had been to archives in Britain, Austria, Germany and Czechia. And while Esperanto – as this book shows – was nearly everywhere in Europe around 1910, something was missing: a rich personal archive that could showcase an individual’s life in, with and around the language.

Returning from archives in Prague in 2020, Bernhard wondered: why not type ‘Esperanto’ into the University of St Andrews’ catalogue? And there it was: thousands of entries of books, manuscript sources and the unexpected, unexplored John Beveridge Collection – a truly unique archive in its entirety.

But this was not an isolated happy accident. Bernhard had the fortune to meet Guilherme Fians at the University of Manchester in 2019, when Bernhard gave his first talk ever on Esperanto. Bernhard and Guilherme stayed in touch and discovered their mutual interests around Esperanto, language politics, communication technologies and knowledge production. Through pandemic-style Zoom meetings between Brazil and Scotland, they submitted a joint grant application to the Leverhulme Trust in 2020 – and got it.

And the final happy accident and missing puzzle piece was Claire Taylor. A second-year history and English student at the time, Claire approached Bernhard in 2020 inquiring about research internships. Bringing together Bernhard’s findings about Esperanto and Claire’s interest in women’s history, they applied for funding from the Laidlaw Foundation – and got it.

So here we were, an unexpected team of two historians and a social anthropologist, plenty of archival sources and a shared enthusiasm for languages and transnational history. We decided to fully dig into the John Beveridge Collection together between 2022 and 2025. Based on what we found in the archives, the three of us had fun curating an exhibition on language, media and globalisation at the Wardlaw Museum, in St Andrews, in April–May 2023. Following the extremely positive interest and attention our exhibition received, we realised the full potential of the material we had at hand and began writing this book. We hope the pages that follow will captivate and surprise our readers as much as this collection fascinated us.

But this book would not have come into being without the generous support we received from a number of colleagues, friends and institutions. We would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding Bernhard and Guilherme’s joint project ‘Sharing Knowledge in Esperanto: From Expert to Participatory Cultures, 1900/2000’, which allowed us to work on this book. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Laidlaw Foundation, which funded Claire’s participation in the project, and our colleagues from the School of History at the University of St Andrews – where the three of us were once based – for supporting our adventures in research.