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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2021
This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English.
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean Grondin, “A Look Back over the Collected Works and Their Effective History,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Jean Grondin, trans. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL, 2007), 409–27, at 417.
2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (London, 2013), 479.
3 Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, 1998), 205.
4 For instance, Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (Ithaca and London, 1994), 56; Catherine Gimelli Martin, “The Ahistoricism of the New Historicism: Knowledge as Power versus Power as Knowledge in Bacon's New Atlantis,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Columbia and London, 2002), 22–49, at 38; and Andrew Bennett, The Author (Oxford, 2005), 12–13.
5 Albert Alderson, The Extinction in Perpetuity of Armaments and War (London, 1908), 22–3. I should acknowledge here that, if Heidegger was not the first to say that language speaks, neither was Alderson. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1906), 1: 42, wrote, “Was in uns denkt, das ist die Sprache; was in uns dichtet, das ist die Sprache.” However, this is not the appropriate venue to pursue the observation.
6 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1992; first published 1980), xx–xxi.
7 Alderson's date of birth is given by the baptism register from All Saints Church, Beaconsfield, Kimberley, now in the William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 157 (no. 627).
8 The Kimberley Siege Account and Medal Roll is located in the Africana Library, Kimberley, as is the photograph in Fig. 1.
9 I owe this charming recollection to Anne Clarkson.
10 Steve Lunderstedt, Kimberley Murders Most Foul: True Tales of Murder Between 1870 to 1950 from the Diamond Capital of the World (Kimberley, 2001), 75–82.
11 On the so-called Confederados of Brazil see Eugene Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson, MS, 1988).
12 The pamphlets are The Fatal Flaw in the Constitution (Cape Town, 1909); The Worst Tax of All (London, 1909); A National Millstone and Its Removal: A Plea for Sound Finance (London, 1911); Urban Land, Traffic and Housing Problems: An Attempted Solution (London, 1912); The Causes and Cure of Armaments and War (London, 1914); Why the War Cannot Be Final (London, 1915).
13 Albert Alderson, The Only Way to Everlasting Peace (London, 1955), includes some scholarly references, e.g. to Adam Smith and Thomas Paine at 155.
14 Alderson, The Extinction, 204–5.
15 Alderson, The Only Way, 46.
16 Alderson, The Extinction, 49. The precise time frame of what we now call globalization is, of course, the subject of considerable debate. For instance, Peter Stearns, Globalization in World History (London and New York, 2010), 90–123, argues for the 1850s as the key decade for its extension of such processes to include India, China and Japan.
17 This last point will now be familiar to historians as a key argument of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 2006; first published 1983), summarized at 78–9.
18 This is somewhat clearer in The Only Way, where Alderson refers (at 29), to “the commercial and producing classes.”
19 Alderson, The Extinction, 51.
20 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992), 4–5.
21 Norman Angell, After All: The Autobiography (London, 1951), 147.
22 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London, 1914), viii–ix. London would, in fact, annex part of Hertfordshire, and several other Home Counties, in 1965. For the original argument against colonialism see Norman Angell, Europe's Optical Illusion (London; first published 1909), 75–88.
23 Angell, The Great Illusion, 145.
24 Alderson, The Extinction, 117–18; compare Alderson, The Only Way, 63–70.
25 Schneider, Gerald, “Peace through Globalization and Capitalism? Prospects of Two Liberal Propositions,” Journal of Peace Research 51/2 (2014), 173–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gerald Schneider and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Introduction,” in Schneider and Gleditsch, eds., Assessing the Capitalist Peace (Abingdon, 2013), 1–9, distinguishing four types of argument.
26 Alderson, The Causes and Cure.
27 The clearest and most cogent survey of this tradition remains Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1992), which despite its title begins its story with Herder in the eighteenth century. See also Joshua Fishman, Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays (Rowley, MA, 1972), 44–85, which identifies a much longer story.
28 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechelhaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), 222–28. On this see especially Robert J. C. Young, “Race and Language in the Two Saussures,” in Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford, eds., Philosophies of Race and Ethnicities (London and New York, 2002), 63–78.
29 On Humboldt, with reference to Kant, see Roger Langham Brown, Wilhelm von Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague, 1967), 109–19.
30 Friedrich Schleiermacher, lecture of 1 November 1820, in Schleiermacher, Pädagogik: Die Theorie der Erziehung von 1820/21 in einer Nachschrift, ed. Christiane Ehrhardt (Berlin, 2008), 74–8, at 77. The translation is my own.
31 William Bleek, On the Origin of Language, trans. Thomas Davidson (New York, 1869), 43–4. For the context see Andrew Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek–Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town, 2006), 18–19.
32 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Harare, 2004; first published 1986), 15. For a critique see Mazrui, Alamin, “Language and the Quest for Liberation in Africa: The Legacy of Frantz Fanon,” Third World Quarterly 14/2 (1993), 351–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, picking up on concerns also touched on by his uncle, Mazrui, Ali A., “The English Language and Political Consciousness in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 4/3 (1966), 295–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 [John Barrow], review essay, Quarterly Review 22 (1819–1820), 203–46, at 240, quoted in Sturgis, James, “Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 11/1 (1982), 5–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 6. On Barrow's many contributions to the Review see Jonathan Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–25 (London, 2008).
34 Sturgis, “Anglicisation”; Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (London, 2003), 197–9, 203 (for the quotation); Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford, 2006), 21–7.
35 Anthony Trollope, South Africa, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1878), 2: 239.
36 J. H. de Villiers, “Ons Toekomstige Landstaal,” in [S. J. Du Toit], Geskiedenis van die Afrikaanse taalbeweging ver vrind en vyand uit publieke en private bronne (Paarl, 1880), 78–91, at 90. The English is taken from the translation of the speech printed in Martin J. Boon, The Immortal History of South Africa, 2 vols. (London and King William's Town, 1885), 1: 220–21; I have only changed “interest” to the more correct “interests.”
37 Richard William Murray, South Africa, from Arab Domination to British Rule (London, 1891), 150.
38 James Stanley Little, South Africa: A Sketch Book of Men, Manners and Facts, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 2: 358.
39 Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, The Life of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (Cape Town, 1913), 424, slightly misquoted in Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 224.
40 Frank J. Tascione, “Lord Milner and South Africa: The Failure of Anglicization, 1900–1905,” unpublished MA thesis, Youngstown State University, 1977, esp. 31–4; Donald Denoon, A Grand Illusion: The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony during the Period of Reconstruction, 1900–1905 ([Harlow], 1973), 75–6. For further background on this period see Dubow, Saul, “Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of ‘South Africanism’, 1902–10,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997), 53–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Alderson, The Extinction, 27. Alderson, The Worst Tax, 1, lists the alternative hypotheses.
42 This was typical of his English contemporaries, and remained consistent in his later work: see, e.g., the complete dismissal of non-Western languages in Alderson, The Only Way, 86.
43 Alderson, The Extinction, 60. On the Scouts see e.g. Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, War of Words: Dutch Pro-Boer Propaganda and the South African War (1899–1902) (Amsterdam, 2012), 226.
44 Alderson, The Extinction, 182–3.
45 Alderson, The Fatal Flaw.
46 Alderson, The Worst Tax, 11.
47 Alderson, The Extinction, 141–4.
48 Alderson, “Why the War,” 27–30.
49 Andrew Thompson, “The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c.1870–1939,” English Historical Review 118/477 (2003), 617–50, at 620–21.
50 Alderson, The Fatal Flaw, 5; Alderson, The Only Way, 219.
51 Alderson, The Extinction, 184.
52 Ibid., 37.
53 The ethnostate concept—not the word, which was coined in 1992—does appear in Alderson, The Only Way, 70, advocating separate regions in Africa for settler and indigenous groups on the basis of the different climates to which each are physiologically suited; both, however, should be “united by the English language.”
54 The two printings are almost identical, with exactly the same page divisions, although a few chapters in the second printing contain short additions squeezed onto the end. The compositional process is visible in various references to the present “moment,” from 1949 (at 229) to 1954 (at 213). P. R. Macmillan had no connection whatsoever to Macmillan & Co., being instead a London-based vanity publisher: a contemporary newspaper advertisement ran, “Have you a book to be published? Any subject considered. Write for details of Co-operative Publishing Plan to …”
55 Alderson, The Only Way, 36.
56 Ibid., 253.
57 Alderson, The Extinction, 172; Alderson, The Only Way, 50–2.
58 See e.g. Roberto Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language (Philadelphia, 2015).
59 Alderson, The Extinction, 179–80
60 Ibid., 207.
61 Ibid., 100.
62 Alderson, The Only Way, 71–104, 131–40 on the British Empire, and 240–41 on English teaching in the Commonwealth. See ibid., 115, on the loss of English in China.
63 Ibid., 141–7.
64 Ibid., 237.
65 See, for instance, Martin Hall and John M. Hobson, “Liberal International Theory: Eurocentric but Not Always Imperialist?”, International Theory 2/2 (2010), 210–45. This was also true in contemporary South Africa generally: see e.g. Dubow, Saul, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of ‘South Africanism’: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal 44/1 (2001), 99–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 101.
66 Francis Place to Marc Isambard Brunel, 26 Jan. 1839, British Library, Add MS 35151, fols. 127, 130. I owe this reference to Arnold Hunt.
67 Thomas de Quincey, Autobiographical Sketches, in de Quincey, Works, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols. (London, 2000–3), 19: 366.
68 This point is developed in Alderson, The Only Way, 54–62, quoting a long section from Bernard Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (London, 1923), 27–41, on China's linguistic diversity.
69 Alderson, The Extinction, 208.
70 Alderson, The Causes and Cure, 9.
71 Alderson, The Extinction, 6–7.
72 Alderson, The Causes and Cure, 8.
73 On migrant and especially Chinese labour in South African mines before 1910 see Selim Gool, Mining Capitalism and Black Labour in the Early Industrial Period in South Africa: A Critique of the New Historiography (Lund, 1983), 112–32, with tables at 121–3; and more recently Rachel Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902–10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle (Basingstoke, 2013).
74 See L. S. Seely, Cases and Materials in Company Law (Cambridge, 1971), 97–8; and Sol Picciotto, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism (Cambridge, 2011), 216–17.
75 J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London, 1900), 140 on the theft of the mines, and 194–6 on the Jewish bankers.
76 Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th edn (New York, 1967), 44–6.
77 See, for instance, Denoon, A Grand Illusion; Gool, Mining Capitalism; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop 8 (1979), 50–80, and the same authors’ reply to critics, “Lord Milner and the South African State Reconsidered,” in Michael Twaddle, ed., Imperialism, the State and the Third World (London, 1992), 80–94.
78 Andrea Bosco and Alex May, eds. The Round Table: The Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy (London, 1997); Andrea Bosco, The Round Table Movement and the Fall of the “Second” British Empire (1909–1919) (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017). For some of the background see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton and Oxford, 2007).
79 Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale, South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (Lanham, 2020). The book's thesis has already aroused controversy: see Paul Rich's critical review in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557571.2021.1920182.
80 Albert Alderson, The Extinction in Perpetuity of Armaments and War (London, 1908), University of Toronto, Robarts Library, shelfmark So A3624e, at 18. On the final page the reader comments, “Was book written on ‘The powers of language’? Armaments & war are spoken of 2 or 3 times! (Here! Here! say I.)”
81 Alderson, The Only Way, 217.
82 Alderson, The Extinction, 16, 18. Compare Alderson, The Only Way, 183: “no nation… is responsible for its actions, every nation is simply the passive tool of its language.”
83 See e.g. Alderson, The Causes and Cure, 14–15; Alderson, The Only Way, 16.
84 Alderson, The Extinction, 22.
85 Martin Heidegger, “Die Sprache” (1950), in Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 7–30, at 30: “Die Sprache spricht. Der Mensch spricht, insofern er der Sprache entspricht. Das Entsprechen ist Hören. Es hört, insofern es dem Geheiß der Stille gehört.” Heidegger, Vorlesung der Satz vom Grund, in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 1 Abteilung, Band 10 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 3–169, at 143: “Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch. Der Mensch spricht nur, indem er geschicklich der Sprache entspricht. Dieses Entsprechen aber ist die eigentliche Weise, nach der der Mensch in die Lichtung des Seins gehört.”
86 Alderson, The Causes and Cure, 15.
87 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XV, in Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, 2017), 197–219, at 210.
88 See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas, “No Identity” (orig. 1970), in Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, 1987), 141–51, and Frederick Olafson, “Heideggers Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse,” in Herbert Marcuse, Utopia: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, ed. Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, and Charles W. Webel (London, 1988), 95–104, at 99. On the former see further the comments of Richard Cohen, “Introduction: Humanism and Anti-humanism,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana, IL, 2003).
89 Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, vii. On the value of studying outliers see most recently the argument of Eric Hayot, Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (New York, 2021), 139.
90 An anonymous review, “The United States of Europe,” Belfast Evening Telegraph, 29 Sept. 1908, 3, was open-minded. Later reviewers acknowledged Alderson's ingenuity, but were finally sceptical. In “Books of the Day,” Dundee Courier, 3 Oct. 1908, 7, we read, “the first breeze of practice would soon clear away the fogs of theory.” Compare Will Crooks, “Language and War,” London Daily News, 23 Oct. 1908, 5, and later “Miscellaneous [Books],” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 22 March 1909, 3. For one modern comment see David Richard Holden's unpublished MA thesis, “The New Pacifism: Liberal-Democracy and the ‘War against War’, 1902–1914,” University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1970, 35–6.
91 D. S. Margoliouth, “Language as a Consolidating and Separating Influence,” in Gustav Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter-racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911 (London, 1911), 57–61, at 59–60. It would be good to know whether Margoliouth had read Alderson, but sadly his extensive manuscript diaries (Bod. MSS Or. Margoliouth 1–7) are missing for the crucial years 1909–16.
92 L. L. Zamenhof, “International Language,” in Spiller, Papers on Inter-racial Problems, 425–32, at 430.
93 See e.g. Prescott Courier, 10 April 1924, 4: “HENRY FORD SAYS THE WAY to get world peace is to make everybody speak English.”
94 On this subject see recently Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (New York, 2018; first published 1998).
95 Buck, Carl Darling, “Language and the Sentiment of Nationality,” American Political Science Review 10/1 (1916), 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 49–50.
96 James Mickel Williams, The Foundations of Social Science (New York, 1920), 92.
97 Charles Templeman Loram, The Education of the South African Native (London, 1917), 226–34. For instance: “Apart from sentiment, there is no reason for wishing the Bantu languages to survive. They have served their purpose. They are not capable of expressing the ideas which the new European civilisation has brought to the country … Besides this, languages are the instruments of communication, and it will be to the interest of South Africa not to perpetuate another language.” Ibid., 233.
98 On these two see especially Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research.”
99 On Welby see Susan Petrilli, Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby (Berlin, 2011); Petrilli, Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (New Brunswick, 2015).
100 C. K. Ogden, “The Progress of Significs,” in Ogden, From Significs to Orthology, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (London, 1994), 1–47, at 10.
101 A. P. R. Howatt and H. G. Widdowson, A History of English Language Teaching, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2004), 283–8.
102 C. K. Ogden, Debabelization: With a Survey of Contemporary Opinion on the Problem of a Universal Language (London, 1931), 13.
103 For other comments on this passage see Holden, Christine and Levy, David, “From Emotionalized Language to Basic English: The Career of C. K. Ogden and/as ‘Adelyne More’,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 27/1 (2001), 79–105Google Scholar, at 80.
104 Michael West and Elaine Swenson, A Critical Examination of Basic English (Toronto, 1934). Ogden would reply to West seriatim in C. K. Ogden, Counter-offensive: An Exposure of Certain Misrepresentations of Basic English, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (London, 1994).
105 See e.g. Friedrich, Carl J., “Intellectual Imperialism?”, Saturday Review of Literature 26/2 (1943), 7–8Google Scholar; Albert Guérard, “Linguistic Imperialism’, New Republic 109/12 (1943), 400. I. A. Richards and Christine Gibson, Learning Basic English: A Practical Handbook for English-Speaking People (New York, 1945), 11, respond to the criticisms. Pollock, Thomas Clark, “Learning Basic English,” College English 8/4 (1947), 211–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, replies in turn. There is a considerable amount of work on Richards and Basic English in China: see John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (Oxford, 2015; first published 1989), 397–429, Q. S. Tong, “The Bathos of a Universalism: I. A. Richards and his Basic English,” in Lydia Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, NC, 1999), 331–54 (who helpfully notes contemporary Chinese critiques of Richards's cultural imperialism); and especially Rodney Koeneke's excellent Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, 2004).
106 Quoted in Koeneke, Empires of the Mind, 186–7.
107 For instance, Silverstein, Michael, “From the Meaning of Meaning to the Empires of the Mind: Ogden's Orthological English,” Pragmatics 5/2 (1995), 185–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tong, “The Bathos of a Universalism,” 346–8; Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (New York, 2009), 114–16. Koeneke, Empires of the Mind, 187–8, is more nuanced. On the topic more broadly see Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London, 1994); and, for a parallel case study of teaching English as a secondary language, see Richard R. Day, “ESL: A Factor in Linguistic Genocide?”, in Janet Cameron Fisher, Mark A. Clarke, and Jacquelyn Schachter, eds., On TESOL ’80. Building Bridges: Research and Practice in Teaching English as a Second Language (Washington, DC, 1981), 73–83.