Conclusion: the history of international communication via postcards and Esperanto

John Beveridge could have joined a philatelic society instead of exchanging postal stamps with Esperanto speakers. Likewise, Lois Beveridge could have travelled abroad simply to visit Dresden, rather than to attend an Esperanto congress, and Heather Beveridge could have published journal articles in French. However, Esperanto, postcards and international congresses were the means chosen by the Beveridge family to transcend their provincial, ordinary lives in Dundee. In this way, Esperanto was one among several entry points these actors had at their disposal to engage with modernity, multilingualism and internationalism during the waves of globalisation at the turn of the twentieth century. Analysing these global phenomena through the standpoints and language choices of these actors is what provides us with an alternative vantage point to the history of international communication.

Grounded in the postcards, publications and archival traces left by John, Lois and Heather Beveridge, this book has revolved around how these actors used Esperanto to convey their messages and communicate their imaginaries. Following these individuals enabled us to address a number of questions. First, at a time when postal services, steamships and the telephone set the pace of modernity and globalisation, what role could language play amidst this increasingly international(ist) scenario? Second, given that international auxiliary languages like Esperanto were tailor-made for cross-border communication, how was Esperanto effectively used and what were its speakers doing with it? Third, why and how would people from relatively small places across Europe invest their time and energy in learning and using such a language? Fourth, what kinds of grassroots internationalism could ‘global’ languages afford ordinary people such as the Beveridges?

Chapter 1 brought us to small places to reveal the modus operandi of a language community in the making. Through the postcards exchanged between Esperanto speakers from rural areas and small towns in Scotland, Bulgaria, Finland and Austria–Hungary, we found how this language gained ground not despite the geographical dispersal of its speakers, but precisely because of it. Had Esperanto become an official or commonly spoken language somewhere, it would have lost its prominence as an international auxiliary language. As such, correspondence exchange became a means for people from small places to carve out a space for themselves in international communication. Through postcards, a clergyman living on Scotland’s east coast got a glimpse of Sweden’s architecture and the kinds of outfits people going on a boat excursion in rural Finland would wear. In satisfying their desires for worldliness, Esperanto pen pals used this language as a means to connect with fellow speakers who were curious about what architecture, clothing and poetry on the other side of the continent looked and read like without leaving their homes – all the while making friends and, unintentionally, contributing to making Esperantujo.

Chapter 2 foregrounded an ordinary Esperanto-speaking household in Dundee, following the ways in which three individuals made sense of speaking an international language locally. After all, to engage with grassroots internationalism, one needed to have the means to do so – including time, money, energy and language proficiency. Hence, before Esperanto became a fully fledged international auxiliary language, it ensured its existence at the local level through people buying language learning materials, studying as autodidacts and joining local clubs to practise the language and make friends. However, for language learning materials, clubs and congresses to exist, Esperanto speakers must make an effort to constantly create and recreate the spaces, publications and occasions on which the language could be used. To some, speaking and writing in Esperanto rapidly turned from a leisure activity into a time-consuming commitment that involved breathing life again and again into the language community.

Chapter 3 shifted our focus to key actors that have been systematically neglected in scholarship: Esperanto-speaking women. If they made up around half of the speakers of the language in the early twentieth century, why is the history of Esperanto so prominently focused on male actors – from Ludwik Zamenhof to the male founders of Esperanto clubs and male editors of magazines? The lives of Esperanto-speaking women in Scotland led us to the plays they performed, associations they headed, and the literary and scientific texts they produced. As women engaged with the language in multiple ways, they also enacted alternative lifestyles, using Esperanto to either find their place in society as teachers and club members or to challenge social conventions of the time when travelling abroad unaccompanied or standing out in male-dominated scientific circles.

In turn, Chapter 4 considered the wider power dynamics involving key Esperanto pioneers – such as Ludwik Zamenhof – and ordinary language speakers as they co-produced the translation of the Bible into Esperanto. Translation and interpreting emerged as major activities among Esperanto speakers, given how the creation of fully developed Esperanto-speaking spaces first required that all content be rendered into Esperanto.¹ While groups of voluntary translators worked to produce the Old and New Testaments in Esperanto, they also had to coin new terms to name things not initially named by Zamenhof, which fleshed out power imbalances in the process of navigating between various language skills and faiths. As a result, producing such a book entailed developing interfaith networks, new vocabulary and the very Esperantujo that was forged through translation.

Combined, these chapters allowed us to narrate an alternative history of international communication in three ways. First, while placing language at the centre of our approach to communication, we have deliberately not focused on the most hegemonic languages at the time, such as French and English. Choosing to concentrate on Esperanto instead led us to explore grassroots internationalism from the perspective of those who communicated across borders by trying to bypass the more explicit power relations conveyed through the use of national languages made global via colonialism and imperialism.

Second, the standpoint adopted in this book allowed for a grassroots history of Esperanto beyond the commonplace historiographical approach that takes Ludwik Zamenhof, other well-known Esperanto speakers, Universal Congresses and major Esperanto associations in Paris, Geneva or Prague as its centrepieces. Rather, we provided elements for a history of how this language gained ground among ordinary people, through centring on the small places and grassroots approaches to internationalism that constituted the core of what turned Esperanto into a fully developed international auxiliary language through correspondence exchange.

Third, our scale of analysis, centred on individuals and small places, enabled highlighting forms of language use that made Esperanto what it effectively is: a transnational and grassroots phenomenon. After all, once this constructed language is out, it takes a life of its own, becoming independent from Ludwik Zamenhof and the top-down ventures of major Esperanto associations. Without substantial backing from state agents or international bodies, Esperanto relied on people voluntarily opting in and willingly learning the language, oftentimes as autodidacts. People – men and women alike, however obvious such a reminder might read – were drawn to Esperanto for various reasons, and even if we may not always have sources that attest to their motivations to do so, we are still able to map what they achieved through their use of the language. In this regard, a curious conclusion that our actors’ narratives point us to is: the process of becoming an Esperanto speaker appears to subvert a clear relationship of cause and consequence, as numerous Esperanto pioneers seemed to have come across the language, decided to learn it, and only at a later point figured out what to do with it and through it.

Having the freedom to choose a language and experiment with it could appear entertaining at first glance. Yet it involved a significant commitment. Unlike national and regional languages – which one knows in advance where they are spoken – Esperanto is spoken by a geographically dispersed community, with speakers potentially everywhere, but concentrated nowhere. Thus, speaking or writing in Esperanto also entailed being constantly involved in the hard work of producing and reproducing the clubs, publications and events that came to provide speakers with occasions to use the language. This maintenance work was not an easy feat, requiring people to perform the roles of president of clubs and associations, translator and author of published volumes, and organiser of congresses.

This book points to how small places should not be perceived as isolated, marginal or peripheral. Beginning our journey from Scotland’s east coast, seemingly on the fringes of international communication and globalisation, we found that this relatively small place was not isolated at all. There was an intense circulation of people and commodities in Dundee’s port that turned it into an international and multilingual space, even though a significant portion of the city’s population was not directly involved in international trade. For those who were not dock workers, sailors and merchants, Esperanto was one way of expanding the intellectual and cultural boundaries of one’s provincial lifestyle. Likewise, John Beveridge’s correspondents in Harmanli or Kymi may have lived in small places but also used Esperanto and postcards to have experiences that made them anything but isolated. Along these lines, these people and places constituted nodes in a widespread network, which calls into question the dichotomy of centre versus peripheries/margins.

This emphasis on ordinary people substantiates a novel approach not only to the history of international communication and Esperanto but, more broadly, to a transnational history of Europe. Through grand narratives about emerging telegraph networks, increasingly popular trips via steamships and diesel trains, and standardisation efforts – aiming to standardise from units of measurement to scientific language and the pronunciation of words in everyday parlance – technological achievements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to characterise this period in Western European history as La Belle Époque. However, as we showed in the introduction, the wonders of La Belle Époque did not reach everyone the same way across Europe. The women who worked in jute mills in Dundee did not necessarily experience the marvels showcased at Universal Exhibitions in Chicago or Paris. Similarly, our actors in Dundee, Harmanli or Kymi neither witnessed the pioneering aeroplane flights nor crossed continents more than once in their lifetimes. Against this backdrop, our narrative written not about but around the Beveridge family reveals how ordinary people were effectively experiencing the technologies, values and expectations that underpinned the wave of globalisation at the turn of the twentieth century.

Finally, one might be wondering – and rightly so – what happened to John Beveridge after he translated the New Testament, or to Lois Beveridge after she earned her Esperanto qualifications and spent years teaching the language in Dundee and Perth. In 1914, when the First World War broke out, John Beveridge was caught in Norway and struggled to travel back to Scotland. These circumstances increased his interest in the Norwegian language, traditions, religion and folklore and, in the following years, he would strengthen his contact with Norwegian clergymen and theologians. In 1938, the many visits of John Beveridge to Free Churches in Norway, the newspaper articles he wrote in Norwegian, the religious exchanges he established through correspondence and the Norwegian clergymen he welcomed in his Dundee home culminated in the Norwegian King Haakon VII awarding Beveridge the Order of St Olav, a high civilian honour.² Between 1914 and 1943 – the year when John Beveridge died of natural causes – we lose the paper trail of his engagement with Esperanto, which leaves it unclear whether he had reduced his use of the language or whether these further documents have not been preserved.

In the meantime, Lois Beveridge combined the skills she developed teaching Esperanto with her interest in religion and spent over thirty years doing missionary work in places ranging from China to the British Gold Coast, after which we also lose track of her internationalist endeavours. Heather Beveridge, in turn, largely eludes the record, which prevents us from knowing where – if somewhere – her 1908 journal article brought her. However, what happened to Esperanto after we lost track of the Beveridge family?

The narrative of this book covered only the beginning: the thriving early decades of this language. Just as the First World War delayed John Beveridge’s trip back to Scotland in 1914, it also hindered the realisation of the Eleventh Universal Congress of Esperanto, due to take place in Edinburgh in 1915. But the war did not put an end to Esperanto. In effect, in the interwar period, manual labourers and anti-nationalist activists embraced Esperanto as a non-nationalist tool to oppose nationalist rivalries, leading to the emergence of left-leaning and worker’s Esperanto associations and congresses.³ Meanwhile, the highly anticipated yet previously cancelled Universal Congress of Esperanto in Edinburgh finally took place in 1926, with John Beveridge conducting an ecumenical service in Esperanto during the congress. Shortly after, with the Second World War breaking out, Esperanto speakers were persecuted by totalitarian regimes in Europe, Asia and the Americas for pursuing a kind of internationalism that was deemed ‘dangerous’ during wartime.⁴

In the second half of the twentieth century, in turn, Esperanto speakers came to increasingly associate the language with variations of ‘neutrality’: in 1954, UNESCO issued a motion recognising the similarities between the agendas of UNESCO and the World Esperanto Association.⁵ Subsequently, in the Cold War period, periodicals for the youth attempted to portray Esperanto as a neutral alternative for international communication – an alternative language that could circumvent ‘capitalist’ English, backed by the US, and ‘socialist’ Russian, backed by the Soviet Union.⁶

In recent years, in turn, Esperanto speakers saw the rise of online language learning through mobile phone apps such as Duolingo, and the ongoing Universal Congresses of Esperanto – whose annual realisation was only interrupted during the First World War – reached the African continent for the first time in 2025, when the congress was held in Arusha, Tanzania.

Yet this is another story. The history of Esperanto continues, and the period this book covers has revealed just a snapshot of it. Blending even newer translations of the Bible, original literature from William Auld – a three-time Nobel Prize nominee for his works in Esperanto – and translations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings – as well as with speakers using not only postcards but also social media platforms to communicate – the language is around and (well) alive, continuing to thrive through the use of emergent communication technologies and securing its place in supporting grassroots internationalism amidst ever-returning nationalist rivalries and xenophobia.