Introduction: building worlds with words

Two men, one language

As the creator of a rather widespread language, it is no surprise that Ludwik Zamenhof has been the subject of numerous scholarly works. John Beveridge, by contrast, did not become known for any particular achievement. Why should someone write – or, for that matter, read – a book that largely revolves around John Beveridge?

Living in Dundee with his Australian-born wife and four Scottish-born children, John Beveridge (1857–1943) was a Presbyterian clergyman, avid reader, enthusiastic beekeeper and someone deeply curious about world affairs. Among his many personal interests were the Norwegian language, customs and history – interests that led him to improve his Norwegian skills with the help of Esperanto-speaking contacts and to visit Norway several times. He also travelled to the 1912 Universal Congress of Esperanto in Kraków. Yet, before these travels, John Beveridge pursued a largely provincial lifestyle, going from his parish back home at the end of each day. In those years prior to his journeys abroad, the city of Dundee served as a constant reminder of the world ‘out there’ and all it had to offer.

In 1901, the RRS Discovery set sail from Dundee – where it was built – on its first intercontinental expedition to the Antarctic. Around the same year, the Port of Dundee was bustling with ships from around the globe coming on a daily basis to commercialise their products. The many spinning mills and power-loom factories in the city accounted for workers from different parts of Scotland and Europe, as well as busy export routes involving the Mediterranean, Australia, the United States, South America and the West Indies. In addition to these businesses, the jute trade was responsible for a significant proportion of Dundee’s internationality. The raw jute was imported from Bengal in colonial India, processed in Scottish mills and then exported to places like the United States and Brazil. The trade and manufacturing of jute attracted people from different nationalities to Dundee.³

Around 1900, Dundee was one of the major port cities in Britain. Yet the city was not what one would consider to be a popular cultural hub, and not everyone in Dundee participated directly in the city’s maritime trade. John Beveridge, for one, did not. However, the constant buzz around jute, whaling and shipbuilding was tangible. Likewise, not every foreign sailor arriving in Scotland spoke English. However, there were other means – and languages – available to those in Dundee who wanted to participate in international flows and get to know people from other nationalities. Around 1906, to go beyond his Scottish milieu, John Beveridge and two of his daughters – Heather and Lois Beveridge – learned Esperanto. In the following years, they used it to meet and exchange correspondence with people from across the world. This is how John Beveridge would later encounter Ludwik Zamenhof, as well as many other fellow Esperanto speakers. This encounter raises the question as to why someone would come up with a language from scratch – and, what is more, why someone other than Zamenhof, from another country, would invest time and effort in learning such a constructed language.

This is what this book is about. What happened to a language, created in a specific place and context, when it travelled to different places and contexts? How did an international auxiliary language – rather than more consolidated, hegemonic languages such as French or English – emerge as an entryway for ordinary people to experience internationalism in practice? What kinds of grassroots internationalism could ‘global’ languages afford people such as the Beveridge family? And, finally, at a time when steamships, international postal services and the telephone were setting the pace of the waves of globalisation in place in the early twentieth century, what role could language play in this increasingly international(ist) scenario?

As much as we know about languages and technologies used for international communication, we know far less about the everyday lives of Esperanto speakers and the functioning of this language community on the ground. By zooming in on Dundee and the Beveridge family, this book recasts the lives of ordinary Esperanto speakers which – as revealed in their postcards, networks and participation in congresses – were anything but ordinary. In doing so, we narrate one among many alternative histories of international communication, using as our entryways not French or English, not the television or the internet, but Esperanto and postcards.

A linguistic solution to a geopolitical problem

At first glance, it may seem odd that many people have communicated, formulated ideas and established relationships using words and grammatical structures that originated at a single person’s desk. Yet Esperanto had – and continues to have – a raison d’être: it was created as a solution to a pressing problem.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted critical moments in the history of globalisation. The decades labelled La Belle Époque in western Europe saw considerable technological advancement, with the telephone gradually replacing the telegraph, the development of electric and diesel locomotives, the flight of the first aeroplane and the popularisation of international postal services.⁴ These technological transformations, on the one hand, nurtured certain European perceptions of modernity, which came to be epitomised by the Universal Exhibitions. Regularly held since 1851, these Exhibitions featured national pavilions through which countries competed to present their cultural and technological achievements to the world.⁵

On the other hand, these technological developments helped expose the unequal power relations that Europe established with other continents. Combined with how colonialism and imperialism expanded European hegemony to the African and Asian continents,⁶ these geopolitical and technological transformations gave ordinary Europeans more reasons to seek ways to communicate and travel across borders, either to explore Europe’s overseas territories or to participate in colonialist endeavours.⁷ These elements underpinning the early twentieth-century waves of globalisation also reinforced the rhetoric according to which modernity was a European commodity to be exported. This is what justified, for instance, the many attempts led by governments and scientists to standardise language use – through the teaching of hegemonic languages in colonial spaces – as well as scientific vocabulary and units of measurement. Faced with the fast-increasing reach of European people, goods, values and ideas across the globe, standardisation took shape through a series of efforts to simplify the world before it became too complex.⁸

Against this background, the growing circulation of people, goods and ideas imposed a question: in which language would a Scottish journalist write a postcard to a French or Romanian colleague, or which language would a German merchant speak upon disembarking from a steamship in the West Indies?

This increasingly integrated world revealed and reinforced several forms of injustice and power imbalance. Not by chance, this moment was also characterised by tensions involving exclusionary nationalism, mass migration and imperialist oppressions of all sorts.⁹ Amidst political, economic and cultural imperialism, linguistic imperialism also gained prominence, as imperialism and nation-building entailed by default the imposition of the coloniser’s hegemonic national language over speakers of minoritised languages.¹⁰ Once acknowledged that a more integrated world depended not only on communication and transportation technologies but also languages, the quest for an international auxiliary language gained traction.

At the turn of the twentieth century, several proposals to facilitate international communication emerged, mainly encouraging the use of French and English as standardising global languages. However, the use of these as lingua francas often faced resistance from nationalists and anti-imperialists who refused to embrace the hegemonic language of another nation-state.¹¹ Aiming to address this matter, an alternative proposal took shape: what if international communication was based on a constructed language – non-national in its own right and, therefore, free of nationalisms? Hundreds of such language projects emerged in the period labelled ‘the battle of artificial languages’. Among them, Esperanto stood out, having gathered over two million speakers by the beginning of the century and enduring to this day, more than 135 years on.¹²

Designed on Ludwik Zamenhof’s desk in Warsaw, Esperanto draws heavily on Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.¹³ Using the Latin script, it reads, sounds and feels familiar to speakers of European languages, which helped its diffusion in both European and imperial spaces. Yet, the dissemination of this language owed significantly to how Esperanto was from the outset a language with a cause.

Zamenhof did not envisage his language project as a prospective replacement for the world’s languages. Rather, he intended Esperanto to be used as a ‘bridge of words’ to connect people who would otherwise be unable to communicate.¹⁴ As an international auxiliary language, Esperanto belonged to no single ethnic or national group. It was no one’s first language – so it could be anyone’s second language. Zamenhof made this principle clear by encouraging all Esperanto speakers to contribute to the ongoing development of the language’s vocabulary.¹⁵ In short, Zamenhof and the early generation of Esperanto speakers conveyed Esperanto as a collaborative, co-constructed language, to be used with the goal of creating a common ground on which potentially anyone is welcome. By stepping outside the linguistic comfort zone of one’s first language, people would use this international auxiliary language as a meeting point from where they could share what they have in common as fellow human beings and learn from each other’s differences as citizens of different nation-states.

Throughout the long twentieth century, other international auxiliary languages were created. This included Volapük – Esperanto’s predecessor – whose language community prospered for a short period in Europe before being engulfed by the rapid growth of Esperanto. This landscape also included Ido and Novial – Esperanto’s short-lived successors – which failed to get off the ground and develop fully fledged language communities. Such a quest for a common language for international communication was also on the radar of internationalist bodies, such as the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, created within the framework of the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris.¹⁶ Additionally, in 1922, the newly established League of Nations formed a commission to discuss the introduction of a constructed language in school curricula.¹⁷ Such debates also gained relevance in the US in 1924, with the establishment of the International Auxiliary Language Association.¹⁸

Babbling first words, crafting alternative worlds: on constructing a language and a community

In 1887, Zamenhof launched a booklet in Russian with the basics of his language project. Nicknamed Unua Libro (First Book), this booklet was immediately published in other languages, with its Polish, French and German versions appearing in the later months of 1887, as well as an English version in 1888. These versions were later compiled in a multilingual edition in the five above-mentioned languages under the title Fundamento de Esperanto.¹⁹ With an introduction justifying the need for such a language – followed by an abridged grammar, language learning exercises and a dictionary – this booklet set the ground for Esperanto to take shape and attract its first speakers, primarily in Russian-speaking territories. Yet it did not take long for Esperanto groups to begin mushrooming across Europe and beyond at the turn of the century, which invites us to consider the particularities of this language and of the community that developed around it.²⁰

In this regard, the term conventionally used to refer to speakers of a given language who recognise it as a group-forming element is speech community.²¹ However, Esperanto contrasts with most so-called ‘natural languages’ in how its speakers tend to prioritise its written form over the spoken. To account for this particularity, we have adopted the term language community to reflect the emic term Esperantujo (Esperanto community, literally ‘the container of Esperanto’). The term language community not only captures the idea that Esperanto speakers share a common language – as in a speech community – but also highlights the way they gather around language-based practices, such as translating into Esperanto, debating linguistic minutiae, and organising Esperanto gatherings – practices akin to those found in communities of practice.²² Additionally, since Esperanto was initially created in written form and only effectively spoken when a second person – other than Zamenhof – learned it, this pre-eminence of written over spoken language is also evident in Esperanto’s prevailing use through correspondence in its first decades.²³

While several scholars refer to the assemblage of Esperanto speakers interchangeably as the Esperanto community and the Esperanto movement,²⁴ we choose the label community. This term underscores that promoting the global use of this language through activism – what one may expect from a language movement such as, for instance, the Basque or the Corsican movement²⁵ – may not be the primary way most Esperanto speakers engage with the language. Along the same lines, we choose the label Esperanto speaker, instead of Esperantist, to emphasise an engagement that lies primarily in the language, not being necessarily connected to the internationalist ideals that nurtured the Esperanto movement at the time.

Unlike the way languages and their communities of speakers customarily develop hand in hand, Esperanto provides a scenario in which the language takes precedence over its community. To consolidate such a constructed language, its early speakers had to create reasons for other people to feel attracted to the language. In addition to consolidating a literary corpus and a language community,²⁶ this groundwork also involved linking with other causes the loosely defined forms of language-based internationalism associated with Esperanto.

In the eastern part of Europe, Esperanto was first embraced by pacifists and Tolstoyans, who perceived the language as a tool to oppose the ethnolinguistic factionalism so prominent in tsarist Russia.²⁷ In the western part of Europe, primarily in France, the idealistic perception of Esperanto as a harmonising, peace-promoting tool came to coexist with Esperanto’s pragmatic use as a language that epitomised the modernity of La Belle Époque. With nineteen Esperanto courses taking place simultaneously in Paris alone in 1902–3,²⁸ the language attracted the attention primarily of intellectuals, scientists and members of the middle classes in the country. For one reason or another, internationally driven publics across Europe learned and used Esperanto in large numbers, combining the language with emerging communication and transport technologies to build cross-border networks and establish personal ties, as well as exchange and produce political, scientific and lay knowledge.

Despite having never become the world’s lingua franca, Esperanto constitutes a remarkable phenomenon from a historical, sociological and linguistic point of view, given the way so many people have voluntarily opted for learning and using a non-compulsory language for diverse purposes over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is not surprising, then, that a number of researchers have explored aspects of the Esperanto language, movement and community.

In general lines, the bountiful scholarly literature on linguistic aspects of Esperanto centres on language planning, vocabulary development and themes that inquire whether Esperanto is a language like any other or an exceptional one.²⁹ Meanwhile, scholarship on literature has approached the particular features (if any) of literature produced originally in Esperanto, as well as translation and the use of Esperanto to make literary works in minority or national languages available to an international readership.³⁰

Among historians and sociologists, the key monographs concerning Esperanto explore primarily the early decades of the language, when the language community and movement were getting off the ground and finding ways of connecting this newly created language with broader societal demands and struggles. These studies systematically map out these developments from the perspective of the key spaces and actors of this story: analysing the battle of artificial languages in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe, when Esperanto emerged alongside other constructed languages competing for global spread and international recognition;³¹ exploring the links between Esperanto and left-wing activism as the language was embraced by pacifists, communists and anarchists;³² and investigating the persecution of international-minded people, among which Esperanto speakers, by totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia.³³

Other sociological and anthropological approaches, in turn, have centred on delineating the constitution of such a diverse and geographically dispersed community throughout the twentieth century, as well as the shapes taken by this language community in the twenty-first century amidst the emergence of digital technologies.³⁴ A number of biographies complement this scholarship by portraying personal and contextual traits of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof,³⁵ as well as of other prominent actors in Esperanto’s history, such as Ludwik Zamenhof’s daughter Lidia Zamenhof³⁶ and a key advocate for Esperanto among proletarians and anti-nationalist activists, Eugène Lanti.³⁷

However, the breadth of Esperanto as a topic for scholarly research also substantiates the shortcomings of this historiography. First, despite Esperanto being a wholeheartedly transnational phenomenon, the vast majority of studies on it tend to focus on national settings, analysing the spread of Esperanto in bounded national spaces such as tsarist (later Soviet) Russia, France and Spain. These are the places where Esperanto gained more prominence in twentieth-century Europe, which justifies the foci of these studies. However, by taking national borders for granted, these country-centred approaches leave out the most striking trait of this language, namely its use to forge cross-border connections and networks.

Second, an attention to the key locations where Esperanto gained visibility cast aside the many other people and places at the margins of this emerging Esperanto-speaking world. In cities like Paris in 1903 or Warsaw in 1907, Esperanto speakers likely had little trouble finding fellow speakers, attending weekly classes or joining local clubs. Their motivation to learn the language may well have stemmed from the multilingual and multicultural character of their cities, where Esperanto offered an alternative entry point into an increasingly interconnected world.

This, however, was far from the reality for those interested in Esperanto in places like Dundee, Scotland, or Harmanli, Bulgaria, in the early twentieth century – places that were neither considered transnational hubs nor featured a well-developed and institutionalised local Esperanto-speaking landscape. How, then, did people in such settings materialise and make sense of their interest in this international auxiliary language? What kind of internationalism could ‘global’ languages afford people such as the Beveridge family? Unpacking how Esperanto serves as a bridge connecting nowhere to anywhere, we explore how these speakers found value in learning and using Esperanto from semi-rural settings in Scotland or Bulgaria around 1910.

First stop: the Beveridge family

This book seeks to dislocate the history of Esperanto and reinsert it in transnational history. Departing from how most scholarly works have centred on key multilingual hubs or on prominent actors in this language community and movement in the first half of the twentieth century, our focus on the Beveridge family provides a rather marginal gateway into the Esperanto phenomenon. From perspectives such as John’s, Lois’s and Heather Beveridge’s, how would one gain access to Esperanto language learning materials and effectively use the language when very few people in one’s surroundings seemed to share this interest? Activities such as swimming, gardening, playing a musical instrument or cooking can be done individually. However, using a language is a conversational practice and, as with any communicative venture, is collective in its own right. What would be the point of learning Esperanto if you know of no one other than your family members who could use it with you?³⁸ A close look at the interests and uses of this language by John, Lois and Heather Beveridge allows us to follow the first steps of the consolidation and institutionalisation of Esperanto on the east coast of Scotland, where using the language entailed not only learning it but also creating contexts whereby this language could be spoken and written.

Rooted in this not so international and not particularly multilingual corner of Scotland, John Beveridge used Esperanto to establish transnational networks, from which he discussed topics ranging from Christianity and Scandinavian history to beekeeping. Additionally, he published magazine articles in Esperanto on Christianity, delivered sermons and contributed to the first Esperanto translation of the New Testament. And, as Esperanto was a family affair in the Beveridge household, he was not entirely alone in this endeavour. Two of his daughters also exchanged postcards, helped found the Scottish Esperanto Federation, taught Esperanto, produced scholarly articles in the language and attended international congresses abroad. Bridging their world with others’, their words reached faraway places, helping to build a geographically dispersed community whose members/speakers are potentially everywhere, but concentrated nowhere.

There is very little on the lives of those at the fringes – and yet, in many ways, at the heart – of the Esperanto phenomenon. Individuals like the Beveridges were the backbone of a vigorous language community, even though they did not live in Warsaw, Paris, Barcelona or Berlin, nor attended the first international Esperanto congress held in 1905. While existing biographies of Ludwik Zamenhof, Lidia Zamenhof and Eugène Lanti focus on the key achievements of prominent Esperanto speakers, turning instead to John, Lois and Heather Beveridge will enable us to zoom in on the everyday lives of people who were not full-time Esperanto speakers – without losing sight of this family’s other interests and occupations, as well as gender and societal roles. In this regard, this book is not about the Beveridge family. Rather, it is a book written around the Beveridge family, which takes them as figureheads to account for an alternative approach to the history of international communication.³⁹

Few archives from early Esperanto speakers have been made public or survived time. By contrast, the well-documented but yet unexplored Beveridge family enables us to reconstitute the lives of some of these individuals. Shortly before his death, in 1943, John Beveridge expressed the wish to have the bulk of his letters, postcards, papers and books donated to the University of St Andrews. This archive constitutes one of the most complete collections with information about individual lives of Esperanto speakers of the time. Starting from the St Andrews’ John Beveridge Collection, we followed paper trails this family left through language learning exercise books, minutes of Esperanto club meetings, translations, personal notes, magazine collections, registers of attendance of Esperanto congresses, newspaper articles and books held also by the Department of Planned Languages at the Austrian National Library, Edinburgh’s National Library of Scotland, the Local History Centre at Dundee’s Central Library and the records of Scotland Censuses, among other primary sources that revealed new facets of our curious and unique actors.

These archives provide an understanding of cross-border exchanges amidst global French and before global English – an understanding that often escapes the mainstream historiography of Esperanto and international communication. By (re)writing and analysing this history from the margins – such as from the connections between Scotland and Bulgaria that we explore in Chapter 1 – we are able to highlight how the perceived marginality of certain places drove people to seek linguistic means of feeling integrated in transnational networks.

In speaking of margins, we do not intend to invoke a simplistic dichotomy of centre versus margins/periphery. First, Esperanto developed differently across various locations at the time. Second, a not-so-central city in Scotland cannot epitomise all possible meanings of marginality. After all, given how international auxiliary languages emerged as a European phenomenon, would not spaces on other continents more typically constitute ‘margins’? Dundee was one among numerous not-so-central places in the history of languages and communication technologies. As such, it served as a stage for a particular articulation of Esperanto’s history – one that did not necessarily centre on Zamenhof or the first international congress.

Similarly, it took decades for a sizeable portion of the population of Dundee to have access to telephones and for the invention of the aeroplane to gain relevance to Dundonians. This may lead us to question: to what extent is it fair to refer to this period as La Belle Époque?⁴⁰ This époque may not have been forcefully belle for people in these locations. In this regard, the approach we propose here aims precisely at giving visibility to people who did not engage with languages and technologies the same way as those in hubs such as Paris, Prague or Chicago. Ultimately, Dundee as a place may be marginal but not atypical. The combination of an individual’s life (John Beveridge) and a somewhere place (Dundee) allows us to account for an alternative history of international communication across spaces and scales from the individual, familial and local to the national and international.⁴¹

Ultimately, examining how John Beveridge established contacts with Norwegian clergymen, how Lois Beveridge taught languages, and how Heather Beveridge produced academic articles offers a novel perspective on Esperanto’s growing popularity around the turn of the century and reveals how languages and technologies were used to engender alternative forms of modernity at the time.

Road map: where languages and communication technologies can take us

Starting our journey from John, Lois and Heather Beveridge, this book aims to bring readers to as many places as Esperanto and postcards brought this Scottish family. To do so, the pages that follow recast the history of languages and technologies, exploring international communication from a perspective at once individual – from the Beveridges’ perspective – and transnational – from the connections they built.

Chapter 1 delves into John Beveridge’s collection of more than fifty letters and postcards sent to Dundee from locations such as Harmanli, Kymi, Kutná Hora, Nový Bydžov and Superaguy. This chapter illustrates the breadth of the networks that people built to exchange information about Esperanto life, translation, the latest literature and non-Esperanto-related topics. These postcards allow us to reconstruct international communication through focusing on emerging languages and communication technologies viewed from the standpoint of one of several ‘marginal’ Esperanto speakers – thus moving beyond the usual narratives around Zamenhof’s achievements, major Esperanto associations and international congresses.

Chapter 2 situates Esperanto in Scotland, and Scotland in the international Esperanto landscape. From the traces of local Esperanto clubs and associations, we explore how the Beveridges and other Scotland-based Esperanto speakers attempted to put Scotland on Esperanto’s map via the creation of Esperanto clubs in lesser-known places like Montrose, Arbroath and Linlithgow, the establishment of the Scottish Esperanto Federation, and an attempt to hold the 1915 Universal Congress of Esperanto in Edinburgh. By regularly organising local meetings, offering language classes and inviting foreign participants to local congresses, these Scottish individuals and institutions helped materialise this language community in its early decades by creating contexts for Esperanto to be effectively spoken.

Chapter 3 deconstructs international auxiliary languages as a male-centric phenomenon. Given that gender has been a systematically neglected aspect of Esperanto’s history, the Beveridge daughters – Lois and her teaching of the language, and Heather and her translation of chemistry journal articles – act as examples of how family networks and women’s language teaching were integral to the pre-war growth of Esperanto. This chapter also considers the roles that various Dundee and Edinburgh women doctors, teachers and journalists held in local Esperanto clubs and abroad when they travelled to attend Universal Congresses of Esperanto in Antwerp (1911) and Kraków (1912).

Chapter 4 explores the first translation of the Bible into Esperanto to examine the processes of language creation and community-building on the ground. While Zamenhof translated the Old Testament from Hebrew, John Beveridge became part of the team that translated the New Testament from Ancient Greek. However, it was challenging to coin Esperanto terms for abstractions such as ‘grace’ and ‘joy’ so that these terms could be understood by Jews and Christians from diverse countries, denominations and linguistic backgrounds. While disagreements around vocabulary development unfolded between Jews and Christians, these translators were also developing Esperanto-speaking interfaith networks and forging vocabulary to refer to things not initially named by Zamenhof.

The conclusion argues for small-scale, empirical approaches to understanding transnational history in the making, moving beyond grand narratives that recount history from the standpoint of empires, governments and key political actors.⁴² Ultimately, this book explores how languages and technologies substantiate the ways we build worlds through words. John, Lois and Heather Beveridge used postcards, steamships and Esperanto to join transnational flows – which were just a few among many languages and technologies available to them at the time.

Research on internationalism and multilingualism tends to focus on the mainstream spaces where these world phenomena gained ground – from the Universal Exhibitions to the Olympic Games and the United Nations. By contrast, cross-border correspondence in Esperanto reverberates a form of grassroots internationalism that illustrates how ordinary people were effectively experiencing the technologies and values that underpinned modernity and the early twentieth-century waves of globalisation.

Writing around John, Lois and Heather Beveridge allows for an overview of a deeply entangled world around 1900 from a ‘marginal’ perspective and place: Esperanto and/in Dundee. ‘Globalisation’ tends to direct our thoughts to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – and rightly so, given the technological and commercial changes in recent decades. Yet, however challenging diachronic comparisons across a century might be, both the 1900s and the 2000s are characterised by rapid changes that spurred both globalisation and its backlashes, including ‘crises’ framed in terms of nationalism, war and mass migration. While this book does not engage with these topics in greater detail, zooming in on this family allows for a glimpse into the lives of hopeful and curious people who sought to embrace the potential futures and opportunities the 1900s offered – with and through Esperanto, which in itself reveals something of its time. After all, this is what ‘Esperanto’ means: the one who hopes. Going beyond a study of a few individuals, these pages are written in the hopeful and internationalist spirit that nurtures Esperanto and that equips us to flesh out the feelings, hopes and life projects at stake.

Notes

1. 1  Brigid O’Keeffe, ‘An International Language for an Empire of Humanity: L. L. Zamenhof and the Imperial Russian Origins of Esperanto’. East European Jewish Affairs 49, no. 1 (2019): 1–19.

2. 2  Biographies of Zamenhof include Ernest Drezen, Zamenhof (Leipzig: Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, 1929); Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960); Edmond Privat, La Vivo de Zamenhof (Tyresö: Inko, 2001); Aleksandr Korzhenkov, Zamenhof: The Life, Works, and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto (New York: Mondial, 2010); Walter Żelazny, Ludwik Zamenhof: Life and Work. Reminiscences (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2020).

3. 3  Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Tara Sethia, ‘The Rise of the Jute Manufacturing Industry in Colonial India: A Global Perspective’, Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 71–99.

4. 4  See Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘The Dematerialization of Telecommunication: Communication Centres and Peripheries in Europe and the World, 1850–1920’, Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007), 345–72; Simone Müller, Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

5. 5  Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Lowie Museum of Anthropology and Scolar Press, 1983); John Desmond Bernal, Science in History, Volume 2: The Scientific and Industrial Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1965).

6. 6  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

7. 7  Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

8. 8  Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

9. 9  See, for instance, Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

10. 10  See Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

11. 11  See Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism; Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995).

12. 12  Roberto Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

13. 13  John Wells, ‘Esperanto’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 4, ed. Keith Brown (New York: Elsevier, 2006), 223–5.

14. 14  Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, ‘Paroladoj: Tria Kongreso 1907 en Cambridge’, in Originala Verkaro de L. L. Zamenhof, ed. Johannes Dietterle (Leipzig: Ferdinand Hirt & Sohn, 1929), 378.

15. 15  Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, Fundamento de Esperanto (Paris: Hachette, 1905).

16. 16  See Louis Couturat, Otto Jespersen, Richard Lorenz, Leopold Pfaundler Von Hadermur and Wilhelm Ostwald, International Language and Science: Considerations on the Introduction of an International Language into Science (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1910); Peter Forster, The Esperanto Movement: Contributions to the Sociology of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1982), 113–27.

17. 17  Inazô Nitobe, ‘Esperanto and the Language Question at the League of Nations’, in Al Lingva Demokratio / Towards Linguistic Democracy / Vers La Démocratie Linguistique, ed. Mark Fettes and Suzanne Bolduc (Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1998), 62–78.

18. 18  Mark Fettes, ‘The Lady, the Linguists, and the International Language’, Language Problems and Language Planning 25, no. 2 (2001): 177–84.

19. 19  Zamenhof, Fundamento de Esperanto.

20. 20  Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals.

21. 21  For a comprehensive discussion of the term, see Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 72–83.

22. 22  Guilherme Fians, Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 12–14.

23. 23  See John Lyons, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 39.

24. 24  See, for instance, Forster, The Esperanto Movement; Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals.

25. 25  See Jacqueline Urla, ‘Ethnic Protest and Social Planning: A Look at Basque Language Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 4 (1988): 379–94; Alexandra Jaffe, Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1999).

26. 26  Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company, 2016).

27. 27  Brigid O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

28. 28  Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau, Histoire de la Langue Universelle (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 329.

29. 29  This scholarship came to constitute the core of Interlinguistics, a linguistics subfield focused on the study of constructed languages. For an overview, see Humphrey Tonkin, ‘One Hundred Years of Esperanto: A Survey’, Language Problems and Language Planning, 11, no. 3 (1987): 264–82; Guilherme Fians, ‘Bringing Constructed Languages Back to the Debate: The Contributions of Interlinguistics to General Linguistics’, Investigationes Linguisticae 46 (2022): 43–52; Grant Goodall, ‘Constructed Languages’, Annual Review of Linguistics 9 (2023): 419–37.

30. 30  See, for instance, Ian Richmond, ‘Esperanto Literature and the International Reader’, in Aspects of Internationalism: Language and Culture, ed. Ian Richmond (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 103–18; Humphrey Tonkin, ‘The Semantics of Invention: Translation into Esperanto’, in The Translator as Mediator of Cultures, ed. Humphrey Tonkin and Maria Esposito Frank (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010), 169–90.

31. 31  See, for instance, Couturat and Leau, Histoire de la Langue Universelle; Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau, Les Nouvelles Langues Internationales: Suite à l’Histoire de la Langue Universelle (Paris: Hachette, 1907); Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language; Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals.

32. 32  Roberto Garvía, Lengua y Utopia: El Movimiento Esperantista en España (1890–1936) (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2021); Javier Alcalde, Esperanto i Anarquisme: Els Orígens (1887–1907) (Barcelona: Edicions Malcriàs d’Agràcia, 2022); Guilherme Fians, ‘O que falar em esperanto quer dizer: Revisitando políticas prefigurativas, movimentos sociais e as novas esquerdas Mana’, Estudos de Antropologia Social 29, no. 1 (2023): 1–31.

33. 33  Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language: Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Ulrich Lins, Dangerous Language: Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism. For a focus on the persecution of Esperanto speakers in totalitarian regimes in East Asia, see Ulrich Lins, La Danĝera Lingvo: Esperanto en la Uragano de Persekutoj (Kyoto: L’Omnibuso, 1973); Ian Rapley, Green Star Japan: Esperanto and the International Language Question, 1880–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). For a glimpse of the Brazilian case, see Guilherme Fians, ‘TEJO, um maduro movimento de juventude’, 240–53, in O Esperanto Além da Língua, ed. Fernando Pita and Guilherme Fians (Porto Velho: Temática, 2017), here 38–9.

34. 34  Forster, The Esperanto Movement; Nikola Rašić, La Rondo Familia: Sociologiaj Esploroj en Esperantio (Pisa: Edistudio, 1994); Irene Caligaris, Unu Lingvo por Ĉiuj, Unu Lingvo de Neniu Lando: Surkampa Esploro pri la Esperantaj Identecoj (Pisa: Edistudio, 2021); Schor, Bridge of Words; Fians, Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks.

35. 35  See Drezen, Zamenhof; Boulton, Zamenhof; Privat, Vivo de Zamenhof; Korzhenkov, Zamenhof; Żelazny, Ludwik Zamenhof.

36. 36  Wendy Heller, Lidia: The Life of Lidia Zamenhof, the Daughter of Esperanto (Oxford: George Ronald, 1985).

37. 37  Ed Borsboom, Vivo de Lanti (Paris: Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, 1976).

38. 38  Hence our preference for referring to using rather than speaking the language, as we approach a language that is used more frequently in written than in spoken communication. See Fians, Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks.

39. 39  See Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 33, on how to write around a historical actor without turning the account into a biographical study.

40. 40  For a critical approach to the terms used in the periodisation of history, see Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

41. 41  See Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History’, The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573–84. On scales in history, see Jacques Revel, Jeux d’echelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard Le Seuil, 1996); Jan de Vries, ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano’, Past & Present 242, no. 14 (2019): 23–36.

42. 42  See, for instance, Jan Rüger, ‘OXO: Or, the Challenges of Transnational History’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (January 2010): 656–68; Ángel Alcalde, ‘Spatializing Transnational History: European Spaces and Territories’, European Review of History / Revue Européenne d’Histoire 25, nos. 3–4 (July 2018): 553–67.