Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University, specializing in a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and its communities. She has published on multilingualism and language policy in Palestine during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods. Her last publications include ‘Unsilencing Palestine 1922-1923. Hundred years after Frank Scholten’s visit to the Holy Land, Contemporary Levant, 2024; ‘Orthodoxy and solidarity: Niqula Khoury’s journey to the League of Nations’ (with S. Irving) in ‘Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause. The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods, edited by Erik Freas, Routledge, 2024. Willem Frijhoff is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at VU University, Amsterdam, and is now G.Ph. Verhagen Professor of Cultural History at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. His scholarly work focuses on cultural, linguistic and religious identities in early modern France, the Netherlands and North America.

• Introduction Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn 1. External linguistic politics and policies in the German-Speaking countries of Central Europe in early modern times and in the nineteenth century - with some references to the present age Konrad Schröder 2. German global soft power, 1700-1920 Nicola McLelland 3. French as a polemical language for Russian writers in the age of Nicholas I Derek Offord 4. The external cultural and linguistic policy of the Italian government in the Mediterranean region and the issue of the National Association for Aid to Missionaries (1886-1905) Paolo Pieraccini 5. Expansion du français et des manières françaises en Europe aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles : résultat d'une politique royale extérieure ou effet d'un certain prestige ? Henri Besse 6. Literary translation as a foreign language policy tool. The case of Russia, mid-eighteenth - early nineteenth centuries Vladislav Rjéoutski 7. L'usage diplomatique de la langue française, instrument de la puissance Lucien Bély 8. The political implications of the idea of 'génie de la langue' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Gilles Siouffi