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Throughout the late nineteenth century Germany was as involved as any European power in the fight to carve up China for political and commercial advantage. The United States, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, and France also issued stamps for their sovereign city states on the Chinese mainland. These city states were land ceded by the Chinese […]

One of the areas in which United States philately differs from nearly all the rest of the world is in our Official Stamps. As an agency of the federal government (one of the powers our Constitution expressly designated as a federal power was control of the national post office) the US post Office always carried

Turkey today is a country with only moderate influence in areas that most often make headlines in American newspapers. But until World War I, Turkey was an important, often the important player in the European theater. Turkey, through Byzantium, later named Constantinople, was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and though Rome itself was

The issuance of postage stamps was one of the great technological and commercial innovations of the nineteenth century. Postage stamps allowed easy prepayment of postage and reduced postal labor costs enormously as each letters no longer needed to be weighed and paid for separately as it came in. But bureaucracies are slow to change and

The country that is today called Germany is a recent political construction. Indeed, even in the last twenty or so years the borders have been in flux with the reunification of the GDR into the Bundesrepublic. Much of the history of Europe over the last 300 years has been concerned with the drawing of Germanic

There are areas of specialization that are unique to each country or areas of philately. United States collectors are avid about plate blocks and stamp collectors in the rest of the world think we are crazy. Israel collectors esteem tabs. British Commonwealth collectors collect gutter pairs and marginal markings. And German area collectors collect Zusammendrucke.

The great scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century found the major European powers dividing up the continent into colonies for economic development. The Germans got into the game a bit later than Britain and for the most part their ventures in Africa were more for the political heft that it gave them than

There is no more appropriate stamp design than the portrait of Hermes, the messenger god in his winged helmet, on the first stamps of Greece. Hermes, son of Zeus, was also the god of commerce so it is not only as a messenger that he is pictured on the first stamp but as the facilitator

The stamps of the British Commonwealth had a tradition of portraying only the ruling monarch. This tradition continued right up through the early Queen Elizabeth era and now most British Commonwealth stamps have the Queen’s portrait along with some commemorative design. In the 171 years of philatelic issues there have only been five monarchs on