Looking at transnational history through individual actors allows categories, such as space, which have often been defined by existing areas of historical research and often based on the nation, to be defined by the subject. Through this one can study space in a more complex way: different scales and hierarchies (eg. local and global) of space and how transnational actors create them, relate to them, and use them, and also how they relate to the transnational spaces which make up so much of the focus of transnational historians. This sort of complexity will help historians avoid seeing the spaces they discuss as fixed or homogeneous and they will be able to appreciate transnational actors not simply in connection to circulations, but also embedded in their local contexts. It is important to note that these spaces do not have to be territorial, but can be social networks, although the historian may still gain from mapping such networks.
These sorts of issues raise a number of questions in relation to the case of Esperanto at the turn of the twentieth century. The users of Esperanto at this time could be thought of as transnational actors forming a border crossing network. One could look at how this transnational space related to other ideas of space at the time, either networks or territorial areas. The users of Esperanto saw it as existing connected to other networks and spaces: commercial and scientific networks, the organizational network for promoting it, national, international, civilisation and humanity. The transnational actors who used Esperanto seemed to have viewed the connection of the language to these spaces in various ways. For some interested its promotion, as attested by the Simon article of 1908 on Esperanto in Germany and the report from the Barcelona Congress of 1909, Esperanto was an international effort whose success could be measured on a national level and could even be a source of national pride. This was partly of course a matter of the teaching of Esperanto needing to operate through existing languages which would often be national ones and also the promotion of it as a part of national curriculums. The Hailman article from 1909 concerns the scientific network which already had an international framework, but which Esperanto could work with and improve the efficiency of. Esperanto could be seen as reinforcing and managing international relations while some also discussed in connection to civilisation and humanity in which it could work alongside the nation, reinforcing it through the international sphere or break it down, which, as Simon mentions, was an argument used by some of its promoters as well as its detractors. Through looking at the transnational actors who used Esperanto one could further investigate the differences of how the language was viewed in connection to other networks and spaces and the reasons behind these views. One would also have to look at the contexts in which these views were formed including at the national level, which it is evident some of the actors at least took into consideration, and how the actors connected their views to other networks such as the commercial, scientific, and political.