Nineteenth Century Travel Ads

The first postage stamp was issued in 1840 and by 1860 every major country had followed suit. Stamps were a major money saving innovation for governments. Their use allowed the standardization of postal rates, compelled prepayment of postage and were a major labor saving innovation in post office accounting and staffing. But until 1878 and the establishment of the Universal Postal Union, the benefits that stamps conferred were only for domestic service. Stamps could be used on international mail, but overseas rates were still complicated and stamps often paid the postage only to the outgoing port where the letter required as much handling and complex rating as in the pre-postage stamp days. It’s clear why countries like the United States and Germany issued stamps. There, the vast majority of letters were domestic and stamps allowed faster and cheaper postal service. But why is it that by 1870, places like Nevis, St Vincent, the Orange River Colony and more than 50 other tiny and insignificant countries had also issued stamps? Their populations were minuscule and the amount of domestic mail in this period from most of these places was virtually nonexistent. Mail in this period in these countries was almost all to and from Europe. A letter writer in Sarawak in 1876 could pay a potpourri of rates depending on the weight of his letter and the destination, so the sender had to go to the post office anyway. Why go to the expense of designing, printing and stocking postage stamps when the previous system of stampless mail worked fine for small quantities of transoceanic communications. The answer is a combination of travel advertising and little brotherism. Wealthy Europeans did much travel in this period and stamps were an attempt to both advertise your country and appear civilized enough to deserve them. And as little brothers of the colonial home country, these tiny mostly island backwaters needed to have everything their bigger brethren did.