Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck, and Claire Taylor: Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers. An Alternative History of International Communication

 Guilherme Fians, Bernhard Struck, and Claire Taylor: Postcards, Translators and Esperanto Pioneers. An Alternative History of International Communication. University of London Press 2025. ISBN: 9781914477881

Esperanto has a rich and multifaceted history. Yet little is known about how ordinary Esperanto speakers used the language in its early decades. What happened to a language, created in a specific time and context, when it travelled to different places and contexts? At a time when steamships, international postal services and the telephone were setting the pace of the early twentieth century’s wave of globalisation, what role did languages play in this increasingly international and internationalist scenario?

This book begins to answer these questions by examining the archives of John Beveridge (1857–1943), a Scottish clergyman who became the founder of the Scottish Esperanto Federation and a key figure in this transnational speech community. It delves into Beveridge’s numerous letters and postcards to show how he made use of this constructed language to build transnational networks across Europe.

The book is also the first to focus on women in a constructed language movement and discusses how Beveridge’s daughters, Lois and Heather, played core roles through attending international Esperanto conferences and translating books into Esperanto. In exploring how the Beveridge family mobilised Esperanto as an internationalist tool, the book shows how languages and media help shape the ways in which we build our worlds through words, providing an alternative, “marginal” approach to early twentieth-century globalisation.