Uncovering the role of literature late imperialism and the rise of new models of internationalism as integral to the invention of Global English this book focuses on three key figures from the Vocabulary Control Movement C.K. Ogden Harold Palmer and Michael West who competed for market share for their respective language teaching systems Basic English the Palmer Method and the New Method through battles over word lists and teaching methods in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on archives from the Carnegie Corporation and considering language teaching in eight global sites this book analyzes how a series of conferences in New York and London resolved their conflicts and produced a consolidated international standard form of English. As a postcolonial approach to the development of the field of English Language Teaching it reveals how these language debates were proxy battles over an idealized global subject an urban secular consumer moving seamlessly between the tribal and global speaking both mother tongues and an international lingua franca Global English. Featuring analysis of the primary texts of each of the three key figures in this book as well as close readings of their readers which featured adaptations of wellknown literary texts from writers like Poe Dickens Wordsworth Milton and Wells it recovers a neglected history of English as it was redefined as an international language through anticolonial resistance in the peripheries and transatlantic power struggles in the metropole during the interwar period.