¹ Liora R. Halperin usefully distinguishes between the ways discourse structures “collective attitudes” and “historical discussions about language itself,” and notes that analysis of the latter has, until recently, been rarer in historiography. Halperin, Liora R., Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven, 2015), 19Google Scholar. Michael, D. Gordin's Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done before and after Global English (Chicago, 2015)Google Scholar; and Northrup's, David How English Became the Global Language (Basingstoke, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discussed below, are two recent exceptions.

² See, for instance, Maier, Charles S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ On English in colonial India see Evans, Stephen, “Macaulay's Minute Revisited: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23/4 (2002), 260–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roy, Modhumita, “‘Englishing’ India: Reinstituting Class and Social Privilege,” Social Text 39 (1994), 83–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On English and British imperial expansion more broadly see Magee, Gary B. and Thompson, Andrew S., Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Douglas Batson, memo to William Benton, 12 May 1965, William Benton Papers, Box 393, Folder 6, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

⁵ Nor can they explain the broader rise of vehicular English, which “actually postdates the high-water mark of the British Empire.” Gordin, Scientific Babel, 295. The historiography of education in the British Empire depicts protracted British ambivalence about the place of English in colonial schooling. Thomas Macaulay's minute of 1835 famously declared the desirability of spreading English in India, while at the same time clarifying it was destined for a circumscribed “class” of indigenous interlocutors rather than the “great mass of the population.” Nevertheless, the Indian case became a well-worn trope in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the British expanded their presence in Africa. Commentators repeatedly invoked the dangers of creating a faction of politicized Africans through English-language education, as had emerged in India. Evans, “Macaulay's Minute Revisited,” 268–72, 276–9; Whitehead, Clive, “The Medium of Instruction in British Colonial Education: A Case of Cultural Imperialism or Enlightened Paternalism?”, History of Education 24/1 (1995), 1–15, at 2–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 14–15; Küster, Sybille, “‘Book Learning’ versus ‘Adapted Education’: The Impact of Phelps-Stokesism on Colonial Education Systems in Central Africa in the Interwar Period,” Paedagogica Historica 43/1 (2007), 79–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Relevant historiography includes Adas, Michael, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 160CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 165–7, 175–7; Anthony May, Glenn, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport, CT, 1980), 82–84Google Scholar; and Navarro, José-Manuel, Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908 (New York, 2002), 31–113Google Scholar. See also Tupas, Ruanni and Lorente, Beatriz P., “A ‘New’ Politics of Language in the Philippines: Bilingual Education and the New Challenge of the Mother Tongues,” in Sercombe, Peter and Tupas, Ruanni, eds., Language, Education and Nation-Building: Assimilation and Shift in Southeast Asia (Basingstoke, 2014), 165–80Google Scholar; Antonio Barreto, Amílcar, The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico (Gainesville, 2001), 1–33Google Scholar; and Go, Julian, “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42/2 (2000), 333–62, at 333–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 343.

⁷ On this dramatic expansion in the geography of US foreign policy see Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005), 23–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Immerwahr, Daniel, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 52–3Google Scholar. As Immerwahr indicates, it presented a social-scientific challenge, for the United States knew very little about the internal dynamics of many European colonies at the moment it ascended to superpower status.

⁸ Notable works focusing on modernization and development in US foreign policy include Latham, Michael E., Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar; Simpson, Bradley R., Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, 2008)Google Scholar; and Ekbladh, David, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Daniel Immerwahr has recently contested this literature's prevailing view of top-down modernization, arguing that Cold War-era models privileging industrial growth and centralized authority coexisted with a powerful countercurrent of community-oriented development thinking. This distinction, modified slightly, is also useful for distinguishing the grandiose schemes of certain mid-century policy elites from more modest language education efforts. Here I use the terms “modernization” and “modernizers” in a somewhat broader sense, chronologically and conceptually, than is typically connoted by “modernization theory,” to refer to policy intellectuals who hoped to project vehicular languages onto heterogeneous populations without much concern for local wishes. In the United States and Britain, language modernizers’ aims mirrored those of modernization theorists in that both looked forward to a global convergence towards western norms and practices (in this case, a convergence of language use towards some form of English). Also like the modernization theorists, language modernizers would find their preconceptions increasingly challenged by the late 1960s. Their keywords, however, did not disappear entirely. Immerwahr acknowledges that many then and since have used the terms “modernization” and “development” loosely and interchangeably (Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 8, 61). Melvin Fox's work on language aid at the Ford Foundation, discussed below, illustrates the intertwined nature of modernization and development in the postwar decades.

⁹ See, inter alia, Gordin, Scientific Babel; Halperin, Babel in Zion; Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley, 2010); Mitchell, Lisa, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington, 2009Google Scholar); and Mullaney, Thomas S., “The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism,” Technology and Culture 53/4 (2012), 777–814CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Northrup, How English Became the Global Language, xi–xii, 16–22; Gordin, Scientific Babel, 307–8. The linguist Crystal, David likewise defends the functionalist view, framing the spread of English in terms of an “urgent need for a global language.” Crystal, English as a Global Language, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003), 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Robert Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford, 1992), an influential intervention from within the field of linguistics, echoes anticolonial and postcolonial intellectuals ranging from Gandhi to the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who announced his switch from writing in English to writing in Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, 1986), xiv.

¹² This lacuna exists on either side of the functionalism divide. Northrup elides the Cold War development rationale behind the Peace Corps and other postwar US aid initiatives—the same forces which landed him in Nigeria to teach English—mentioning the Peace Corps exactly once, in a prefatory note. Meanwhile, Marnie Holborow, in a Marxist account of global English, associates the concept of languages of “wider communication” with 1970s scholarship in linguistics, when in fact talk of languages of “wide” and “wider communication” appeared in policy debates two decades earlier. Cf. Northrup, How English Became the Global Language, xi; Holborow, The Politics of English: A Marxist View of Language (London, 1999), 69–70.

¹³ Gordin, Scientific Babel, 295, 310, 315.

¹⁴ Quoted in Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism, 138; on postwar discourses see ibid., 65–7. Although the British Council was forbidden from operating in the colonies, interwar debates over the place of English in colonial education happened likewise under the sign of culture, with advocates of English-language education arguing that it would help to solidify British values in the colonies.

¹⁵ Mary Louise Pratt has conceptualized “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 33–40). By framing UNESCO as arena rather than actor, I depart from existing scholarship on its work in educational development, which concentrates primarily on the operational and geopolitical difficulties facing the organization's literacy activities from the 1940s through the 1960s: that is to say, the budgetary constraints, internecine rivalries, and Cold War impasses that hampered UNESCO's educational efforts. Cf. Jones, Phillip W. with Coleman, David, The United Nations and Education: Multilateralism, Development and Globalisation (London, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorn, Charles and Ghodsee, Kristen, “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: Communism, UNESCO, and the World Bank,” Diplomatic History 36/2 (2012), 373–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Maurel, Chloé, Histoire de l'Unesco: Les trente premières années. 1945–1974 (Paris, 2010)Google Scholar, esp. 76–85, 275–6.

¹⁶ On Felix Walter see Stern, H. H., Foreign Languages in Primary Education: The Teaching of Foreign or Second Languages to Younger Children (London, 1967)Google Scholar, ix; and “In Memoriam,” Linguistic Reporter 2/6 (1960), 2, available at www.cal.org/content/download/1968/24926/file/LinguisticReporterVolume2.pdf, accessed 16 Feb. 2016.

¹⁷ Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York, 2012), 126–35.

¹⁸ Fox, Melvin J., Language and Development: A Retrospective Survey of Ford Foundation Language Projects, 1952–1974 (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

¹⁹ “General Considerations of Language Problems in Fundamental Education,” 19 June 1947, UNESCO/Educ./31/1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47”; C. K. Ogden, “Article,” 27 July 1946, File 375:4; “Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education: Notes for Acting Director General's Opening Speech,” 30 June 1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47”; Felix Walter, “UNESCO and Language,” 31 March 1952, EDIU/6/52025, File 408.3:37, Part I. All in UNESCO Archives, Paris, France.

²⁰ On France, contrast Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, 1976)Google Scholar; with Chanet, Jean-François, L’école républicaine et les petites patries (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar. On Mexico see Vaughan, Mary K., Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson, 1997)Google Scholar; and Rockwell, Elsie, “Schools of the Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms in Tlaxcala, 1910–1930,” in Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC, 1994), 170–208Google Scholar. On the Soviet Union see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clark, Charles E., Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (Cranbury, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar.

²¹ Barker, John, “Where the Missionary Frontier Ran Ahead of Empire,” in Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), 86–106Google Scholar; Curtis, Sarah A., Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Northrup, How English Became the Global Language, 76–7.

²² Renoliet, Jean-Jacques, L'Unesco oubliée: La Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris, 1999), 33–4Google Scholar.

²³ Mazower, Mark, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2012)Google Scholar, 191–213, xvii; Maurel, Histoire de l'Unesco, 15–27; Renoliet, L'Unesco oubliée, 158–78.

²⁴ Robert Rice, “The Thousand Silver Threads,” New Yorker, 16 Feb. 1952, 38.

²⁵ Arthur Sweetser, letter to William Benton, 17 Aug. 1950, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 2. On Sweetser see Mazower, Governing the World, 145, 192–3, 196, 211, 213.

²⁶ On the intersection of mass-communications technologies and internationalism at UNESCO see Tom Allbeson, “Photographic Diplomacy in the Postwar World: UNESCO and the Conception of Photography as a Universal Language,” Modern Intellectual History 12/2 (2015), 383–415, at 386–7.

²⁷ Bellos, David, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation (London, 2012), 268–82Google Scholar.

²⁸ Colonel A. Myers, “Education for International Understanding: The Part of Language-Teaching,” 2 July 1947, Educ./38/1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives.

²⁹ Julian Huxley, letter to Margaret Read, 3 April 1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives; Yvonne Oddon, “Recommendations for the Planning of Instructional Materials in a Fundamental Education Experiment,” 30 Jan. 1949, and Alfred Métraux and Yvonne Oddon, “L’éducation de base dans la vallée de Marbial,” 1 March 1949, Folder 135, Box 20, Series 100, Record Group 1.2, Projects, Rockefeller Foundation records, Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC); Watras, Joseph, “UNESCO's Programme of Fundamental Education, 1946–1959,” History of Education 39/2 (2010), 219–37, at 225–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Julia Pohle, “Kêbé l'Inesko Fò!”, UNESCO Courier, Sept. 2010, 41–3.

³⁰ “Notes for Acting Director General's Opening Speech”; “General Considerations of Language Problems in Fundamental Education.”

³¹ On the evolution of UNESCO's programs see Maurel, Histoire de l'Unesco, 264–5; and Watras, “UNESCO's Programme of Fundamental Education,” 236–7. Felix Walter, among others, would continue to frame developing-world multilingualism as a “barrier” and “problem” in the 1950s: see Walter, “UNESCO and Language”; [Felix Walter], “UNESCO and Language Teaching,” 1955, File 408.3:37, Part II, UNESCO Archives; and Felix Walter, “UNESCO and the Teaching of Modern Languages,” 19 March 1959, ED/II/3/59.029, File 408.3:37, Part II, UNESCO Archives. Walter's authorship of “UNESCO and Language Teaching” can be assumed based on its similarities to his signed 1952 and 1959 reports, including file location, writing style, and shared preoccupations with American teaching techniques and multilingualism in Asia and Africa.

³² See, for instance, Simpson, Christopher, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945–1960 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; McCoy, Alfred W., A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, chap. 2; and Ryan, Joseph W., Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey: Sociologists and Soldiers during the Second World War (Knoxville, 2013)Google Scholar.

³³ “Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education: Summary Report of the First Meeting,” 17 July 1947, Educ./Com.Exp./S.R.1, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives; “Language-teaching and UNESCO,” 2 June 1947, Educ./39/1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives. On the Army Specialized Training Program see Mitchell, Cheryl Brown and Vidal, Kari Ellington, “Weighing the Ways of the Flow: Twentieth Century Language Instruction,” Modern Language Journal, 85/1 (2001), 26–38, at 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ At the turn of the twentieth century, proponents of the “direct method” had encountered pushback from classicists and from scholars who did not have oral fluency in target languages—two groups which, in the case of elite British boarding schools, overlapped. The First World War presented a more political threat to the direct method, which had roots in Germany. Scarce resources could also tip the scales in favor of reading over speaking and listening skills. One influential study of language teaching in American higher education, the 1929 Coleman Report, concluded that reading proficiency should be stressed for the simple reason that it required less classroom time and could be taught more effectively by nonnative speakers. On the history of language-teaching pedagogies in Britain and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century see Bayley, Susan N., “The Direct Method and Modern Language Teaching in England 1880–1918,” History of Education 27/1 (1998), 39–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell and Vidal, “Twentieth Century Language Instruction,” 26–30; and Parker, William, The National Interest and Foreign Languages: A Discussion Guide and Work Paper for Citizen Consultations, rev. edn (Washington, DC, 1957; first published 1954), 51–61Google Scholar.

³⁵ “Language-teaching and UNESCO.” The results of the Army Specialized Training Program, informed by the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, would coalesce after the war into the “audiolingual method” (sometimes referred to as the “oral–aural” method), which emphasized rote oral drilling as a means of enabling students to render language patterns without the need for conscious reflection. The audiolingual method was popular in the 1950s and the 1960s, before being undermined by empirical findings and by the spread of Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism. Mitchell and Vidal, “Twentieth Century Language Instruction,” 29–30; Fox, Language and Development, 19; “Forty Years of Language Teaching,” Language Teacher 40 (2006). 1–2; “From Audiolingual to Suggestopedia: the Varieties of Language Instruction,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Feb. 1989, A14.

³⁶ Richards in “Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education: Summary Report of the Sixth Meeting,” 25 July 1947, Educ./Com.Exp./S.R.6. Myers in “Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education: Report of the 3rd meeting,” 18 July 1947, Educ./Com.Exp./S.R.3; “Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education: Summary Report of the Fifth Meeting,” 22 July 1947, Educ./Com.Exp./S.R.5; “Summary Report of the Sixth Meeting”; and Col. Myers, “Education for International Understanding: The Part of Language-Teaching,” 2 July 1947, Educ./38/1947. All in File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives.

³⁷ Huxley, letter to Read, 3 April 1947; André Martinet, “Reflections on the Choice of a Language in Fundamental Education,” 3 July 1947, Educ./41/1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives. Felix Walter's 1952 report “UNESCO and Language” explained that the artificial-language advocates at the 1947 meeting believed that artificial tongues were means of avoiding “linguistic imperialism.”

³⁸ C. K. Ogden, “Article”; see also Walter, “UNESCO and Language.”

³⁹ Richards in “Globalingo,” Time, 31 Dec. 1945.

⁴⁰ Alice L. Conklin has shown how colonial governance in French West Africa took a conservative turn during the interwar period, in response to urban Africans’ demands for a more equitable distribution of power. Shedding its earlier philosophy of assimilation, the interwar French administration embraced “associationalist” policies aimed at bolstering the authority of designated tribal elites. Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, 1997)Google Scholar, chaps. 5, 6; see also Cooper, Frederick, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa,” Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines 10 (2004), 9–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On late colonial violence see Fabian Klose, “‘Source of Embarrassment’: Human Rights, State of Emergency, and the Wars of Decolonization,” in Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011), 237–7Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Sauvageot in “Summary Report of the Fourth Meeting,” 23 July 1947, Educ./Com.Exp./S.R.4, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives.

⁴² Jean-Jacques Deheyn in “Summary Report of the Sixth Meeting”; and Jean-Jacques Deheyn, “Note concernant ce problème,” August 1947, File 375:4, UNESCO Archives. On Deheyn see “Liste des experts,” 27 June 1947, UNESCO/Educ./36/1947, File 375:4.A.064.“47,” UNESCO Archives.

⁴³ Wedgwood quoted in House of Commons Debates, Hansard (hereafter H.C. Deb.), 2 June 1937, vol. 324, cols. 169–71. For Wedgwood's interwar comments on English-language education in the British Empire see also H.C. Deb., 13 July 1928, vol. 219, cols. 2671–2, 2676; H.C. Deb., 30 April 1929, vol. 227, cols. 1484–6; H.C. Deb., 26 June 1930, vol. 240, cols. 1471–3; H.C. Deb., 22 April 1932, vol. 264, cols. 1826–8; and H.C. Deb., 25 July 1935, vol. 304, cols. 2097–8. On Wedgwood see Mulvey, Paul, The Political Life of Josiah C. Wedgwood: Land, Liberty and Empire, 1872–1943 (Woodbridge, 2010), 7–12, 71–2, 117–19Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Koeneke, Rodney, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, 2004), 186–7Google Scholar; Gordin, Scientific Babel, 297.

⁴⁵ F. D. Lugard, “Education in Tropical Africa,” Edinburgh Review, July 1925, reprinted by the Colonial Office, Aug. 1930, CO 879/123/12; The Place of the Vernacular in Native Education (1925), African No. 1110, CO 879/121/4; Whitehead, “The Medium of Instruction in British Colonial Education,” 2–4, 11; Evans, “Macaulay's Minute Revisited,” 279. Lugard was also an influential figure on the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission in the 1920s and early 1930s. On Lugard at the League see Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On analogies between education in British India and British Africa see, inter alia, Brown, Godfrey N., “British Educational Policy in West and Central Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 2/3 (1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 365–77, at 365; and Evans, “Macaulay's Minute Revisited,” 279.

⁴⁶ Pedersen, Guardians, 396–99; Klose, “‘Source of Embarrassment’,” 245–6; and Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 150–51.

⁴⁷ Marcel Destombes, “Mission à New York: Neuvième session du Conseil de Tutelle,” memo to Director General, 25 Sept. 1951, XR/NSGT/Memo 177674, File 375:408.8.A.064.“51,” Part II, UNESCO Archives.

⁴⁸ Ogden, “Article.”

⁴⁹ Myers in “Summary Report of the First Meeting.”

⁵⁰ “Fundamental Education: Common Ground for All Peoples: Chapter V: Suggested Lines of Action,” 21 March 1947, UNESCO/Educ./10/1947, File 375:4, UNESCO Archives.

⁵¹ “General Considerations of Language Problems in Fundamental Education.”

⁵² “Notes for Acting Director General's Opening Speech.”

⁵³ Cooper, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences,” 10, 26, 32–3.

⁵⁴ Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, chap. 4.

⁵⁵ UNESCO/CL/489 (circular letter to member states, 1951), File 375:408.8, Part I, UNESCO Archives; “UNESCO Project: The Use of Indigenous Languages in Education: Progress Report: January 1951” (1951), File 375:408.8, Part I, UNESCO Archives; Abid Husain, letter and attached report to A. Barrera Vásquez, 25 April 1951, File 375:408.8.A.064.“51,” Part IA, UNESCO Archives; “Purpose and Scope of the Meeting,” 15 Nov. 1951, UNESCO/EDCH/Meeting, Vern./8, File 375:408.8.A.064.“51,” Part IB, UNESCO Archives; Walter, “UNESCO and Language.”

⁵⁶ Fox, Language and Development, 33.

⁵⁷ James E. Ianucci, “English Language Teacher Training Project in Indonesia: A Brief History and Evaluation 1959–67,” Report 006680, Box 300, FA739C, Ford Foundation records (FF), RAC.

⁵⁸ UN resolutions cited in UNESCO's untitled progress report of 10 July 1951, File 375:408.8, Part I, UNESCO Archives.

⁵⁹ Unesco's work on vernacular literacy in the early 1950s would be credited when the issue again came to the fore in the more radicalized climate of the 1970s. See Patricia Lee Engle, “The Use of the Vernacular Languages in Education: 1973,” Dec. 1973, Box 184, Report 004048, FA739B; and Melvin J. Fox, “Some Thoughts on Language as a Factor in Basic Education in Africa,” 8 April 1974, Report 008184, Box 348, FA739C. Both in FF, RAC.

⁶⁰ Walter, “UNESCO and the Teaching of Modern Languages.”

⁶¹ Roger Louis, Wm. and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22/3 (1994), 462–511Google Scholar; Cooper, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences,” 15–19, 24–7; and Rist, Gilbert, Le développement: Histoire d'une croyance occidentale, rev. 4th edn (Paris, 2013), 131–97Google Scholar.

⁶² [Walter], “UNESCO and Language Teaching”; Walter, “UNESCO and the Teaching of Modern Languages”; Walter, “UNESCO and Language.”

⁶³ [Walter], “UNESCO and Language Teaching.”

⁶⁴ Matta Akrawi, memo to Lionel Elvin et al., 25 Jan. 1951, File 375:408.8, Part I, UNESCO Archives. When Elvin, then director of UNESCO's Education Department, responded that this was a mere “misunderstanding” and that the conference was not, in fact, dedicated to the teaching of English, Akrawi scribbled dyspeptically, “Not quite a misunderstanding!” Lionel Elvin, memo to Matta Akrawi, 29 Jan. 1951, File 375:408.8, Part I, UNESCO Archives. Akrawi's biography presumably had sensitized him to issues that his British counterparts were inclined to overlook. During the interwar period, Akrawi had spent formative years participating in a student group noted for linking Arabic-language education to political pan-Arabism and anticolonial nationalism. Following Iraq's independence in 1932, Akrawi became a highly placed figure in the Iraqi educational system. On Akrawi see Falb Kalisman, Hilary, “Bursary Scholars at the American University of Beirut: Living and Practising Arab Unity,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42/4 (2015), 599–617Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ “Meeting of Experts on the Use in Education of African Languages in Relation to English, Where English Is the Accepted Second Language: Report Presented to the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” 15 Dec. 1952, EJD/PZ, File 375:408.8(6)A0.64(66)“52,” Part II, UNESCO Archives.

⁶⁶ W. Freeman Twaddell, “U.S. Activities of the Center for Applied Linguistics, 1959–1973,” spring 1973, Report 004959, Box 220, FA739B, FF, RAC; Charles A. Ferguson, “The Role of the Center for Applied Linguistics, 1959–1967” (1967), Folder 3, Box 3, Series II, FA572, FF, RAC.

⁶⁷ See Jesse MacKnight, letter to William Benton, 26 May 1950, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 2; William Benton, letter to Jesse MacKnight, 31 May 1950, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 2; Congressional Record proceedings, 1 April 1952, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 4; Delegation of the United States of America to the Second Extraordinary Session of the General Conference of UNESCO, “An Appraisal of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” 1–4 July 1953, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 5; Ray Murphy, letter to Kenneth Holland, 5 Jan. 1955, Benton Papers, Box 388, Folder 5.

⁶⁸ Herbert J. Abraham, memo to Charles Thomson, 21 Sept. 1951, EDIU/244.910, File 408.3:37, Part I, UNESCO Archives.

⁶⁹ Francis J. Colligan, letter to I. A. Richards, 13 Sept. 1946, Folder 2795, Box 234, Series 200, RG 1.1, Projects, RF, RAC.

⁷⁰ Inderjeet Parmar has convincingly described the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations’ portrayal of themselves as non-state actors as one of the characteristic “fictions” of twentieth-century American philanthropy. Ford's trustees from the early 1950s through the early 1970s included numerous individuals with ties to the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department, including Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, 3–6, 53–5. On Ford in Indonesia see Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, 124–48.

⁷¹ Melvin J. Fox, “The Work of American Foundations in English as a Second Language,” June 1961, Report 002236, Box 91, FA739A, FF, RAC.

⁷² Melvin J. Fox, memo to John B. Howard, 23 Dec. 1959, folder labeled “Africa—Trip to Africa (Melvin J. Fox)—African Language Training Project and ‘Trip to the Union of South Africa’ Report—Charles Ferguson,” Box 3, Series I, FA608, FF, RAC; Northrup, How English Became the Global Language, 99–100.

⁷³ On the establishment of the USIA see Osgood, Kenneth, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, 2006)Google Scholar, 46–75, esp. 57–8, 70–71.

⁷⁴ Parker, The National Interest and Foreign Languages, 59–64. Parker noted that, despite the boost that the Second World War had given to language acquisition research, foreign-language enrollment in American universities had dropped every consecutive year from 1947 to 1953.

⁷⁵ Watzke, John L., Lasting Change in Foreign Language Education: A Historical Case for Change in National Policy (Westport, CT, 2003), 45–51Google Scholar; Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, 186; Fox, Language and Development, 36.

⁷⁶ Fox, Language and Development, 33–5; USIA annual report numbers cited in Albert H. Marckwardt, “Teaching English as a Foreign Language” (1967), Folder 4, Box 3, Series II, FA572, FF, RAC.

⁷⁷ “Our History,” CAL website, at www.cal.org/who-we-are/our-history, accessed 2 Feb. 2016.

⁷⁸ CAL, Second Language Learning as a Factor in National Development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: Summary Statement and Recommendations of an International Meeting of Specialists Held in London, December 1960 (Washington, DC, 1961), 2. On Walter's connection to Ford and the CAL see CAL, memo to Ford Foundation, 8 Oct. 1959, and Melvin J. Fox, memo to George Gant and John Howard, 27 Jan. 1960, both in folder labeled “Africa—Trip to Africa,” Box 3, Series I, FA608, FF, RAC.

⁷⁹ On the Development Decade see Rist, Le développement, 167.

⁸⁰ Heil, Alan L., Voice of America: A History (New York, 2003), 273–87Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Quoted in Slotten, Hugh R., “Satellite Communications, Globalization, and the Cold War,” Technology and Culture 43/2 (2002), 315–50, at 336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² Wilbur Schramm, “Communication Satellites—Some Social Implications,” 10 Sept. 1965, UNESCO/Spacecom/3, File 629.19: 621.39 MEE, UNESCO Archives.

⁸³ “Report on Survey of U.S. Government English Language Programs for Fiscal Years 1964, 1965 and 1966,” 20 May 1965, and “Peace Corps Volunteers Employed as English Teachers as of March 31, 1965” (1965?), Folder 13, Box 3, Series III, FA548, FF, RAC; “English Language Programs of the Agency for International Development,” Department of State, Agency for International Development, Dec. 1967, at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnaad469.pdf, accessed 8 Feb. 2016; J. M. Cowan, “J. M. Cowan's Visit to Saigon, February 21–25, 1969,” 1969, Report 006678, Box 300, FA739C, FF, RAC.

⁸⁴ “National Security Action Memorandum No. 332: U.S. Government Policy on English Language Teaching Abroad,” 11 June 1965, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library website, at www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/nsams/nsam332.asp, accessed 24 July 2013, emphasis in the original. The quoted text is from an unclassified portion of the memo which was intended for public consumption.

⁸⁵ Alexis Ladas, memo to William Benton, 25 Aug. 1965; and William Benton, memo to Alexis Ladas, 20 Aug. 1965. On Ladas see William Benton, letter to Douglas Batson, 27 Aug. 1965. All in Benton Papers, Box 393, Folder 6.

⁸⁶ Douglas Batson, letter to William Benton, 16 Aug. 1965, Benton Papers, Box 393, Folder 6.

⁸⁷ Batson explained that this division of labor was in part an attempt to avoid provoking France over the rise of US power in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Batson, memo to Benton, 12 May 1965, and Douglas Batson, memo to William Benton, 19 May 1965, Benton Papers, Box 393, Folder 6.

⁸⁸ Fox, Language and Development, 36–7, 42–3, 67. On English and the World Second Language Survey see, for instance, F. F. Hill, memo to John Howard et al., 2 Dec. 1959 (headed “Copied from Handwritten Notes”), and CAL, memo to Ford Foundation re “Survey of Needs and Resources for Teaching English and Other World Languages,” 8 Oct. 1959, both in folder labeled “Africa—Trip to Africa,” Box 3, Series I, FA608, FF, RAC.

⁸⁹ On “permanent-effect” versus “stopgap” approaches see Ianucci, “English Language Teacher Training Project in Indonesia”; “Ford Foundation Activities in Teaching English as a Second Language,” Feb. 1964, Folder 2, Box 1, Series I, FA572, FF, RAC; and Harvey P. Hall, memo to J. D. Kingsley, 15 Aug. 1966, Report 009300, Box 386, FA739D, FF, RAC. On the 1970s retrenchment see Melvin Fox, memo to Francis X. Sutton, 15 Dec. 1978, Report 008175, Box 347, FA739C, FF, RAC.

⁹⁰ “National Security Action Memorandum No. 332.”

⁹¹ “English Language Programs of the Agency for International Development.”

⁹² Fox, Language and Development, 147. On the evolution of the foundation's work see Melvin Fox, memo to F. Champion Ward, 14 Sept. 1964, Folder 12, Box 9, Series IV, FA582; [Francis X. Sutton], “A Gloss on Fox: Some Implications of the Fox Report for Foundation Activities in the Language Field and Proposals for Follow-Up,” 8 Jan. 1968, Report 007118, Box 314, FA739A; Betty Pinto Skolnick, memo to Reuben Frodin, 12 Aug. 1971, Report 006260, Box 280, FA739B; Frank Cawson, “The International Activities of the Center for Applied Linguistics,” 1973, Report 003315, Box 157, FA739B. All in FF, RAC.

⁹³ Interwar restrictions on English teaching in British Africa had prompted one Labour MP to ask, “Is this the new Imperialism, to discourage the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton?” H.C. Deb., 02 July 1928, vol. 219, cols. 952–3.

⁹⁴ “English Language Programs of the Agency for International Development.”

⁹⁵ On Huxley's connection to eugenics and his ambiguous antiracism, see Sluga, Glenda, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 23/3 (2010), 393–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Selcer, Perrin, “Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce UNESCO's Scientific Statements on Race,” Current Anthropology 53/S5 (2012), S173–S184CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brattain, Michelle, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112/5 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1386–1413.

⁹⁶ “English Language Programs of the Agency for International Development,” 1; Fox, Language and Development, 147, 150.

⁹⁷ See, for instance, Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 151–207; and Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, 190–225.

⁹⁸ Lawrence H. Summers, “What You (Really) Need to Know,” New York Times, 20 Jan. 2012, ED26.

⁹⁹ Notes one US-based professor of German, students “frequently display an astonishing naïveté when it comes to the internet and its content; they do not question its authority or truthfulness. The speed with which an online service or web tool translates a sentence is sometimes even seen as a mark of quality: The translation must be right—even if the student does not understand it—because the computer provided the result so quickly and without hesitation.” Steding, Sören, “Machine Translation in the German Classroom: Detection, Reaction, Prevention,” Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 42/2 (2009), 178–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 178. Although online translation tools “cultivate an image of automated, frictionless translation,” this image belies the continuing imperfection of machine translation technology, and the translation industry's ongoing reliance on human labor. See Kushner, Scott, “The Freelance Translation Machine: Algorithmic Culture and the Invisible Industry,” New Media & Society 15/8 (2013), 1241–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Gordin, Scientific Babel, 312; “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” Modern Language Association, at www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Teaching-Enrollments-and-Programs/Foreign-Languages-and-Higher-Education-New-Structures-for-a-Changed-World, accessed 12 Feb. 2016.