Making World English

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This book uncovers the interplay of literature, late imperialism, and emerging internationalism in the creation of Global English, focusing on three pivotal figures from the "Vocabulary Control Movement": C.K. Ogden, Harold Palmer, and Michael West. These individuals vied for dominance in language teaching with their respective systems—Basic English, the Palmer Method, and the New Method—through debates over word lists and pedagogical approaches during the 1920s and 30s. Utilizing archives from the Carnegie Corporation and examining language instruction across eight global locations, the analysis reveals how conferences in New York and London reconciled their disputes, leading to a standardized form of English. Adopting a postcolonial lens, the book illustrates how these language discussions served as proxy battles over an idealized global subject—an urban, secular consumer navigating both local and global contexts, fluent in mother tongues and an international lingua franca, Global English. It includes critical analyses of the primary texts of the three figures and detailed readings of their readers, which featured adaptations of literary works by authors such as Poe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Milton, and Wells, thereby recovering a neglected history of English as it evolved into an international language amid anti-colonial resistance and transatlantic power dynamics during the interwar period.