Great Britain, a small island off the coast of north-west Europe, has had an oversized impact on the world map.
We won’t here debate that impact in terms of its effects on perhaps billions of people.
Here, we will try to make sense of the states of the British Commonwealth for stamp collectors.
From Empire to Commonwealth
Historians looking for a start date for the British Empire often alight on the Jamestown settlement in the United States from 1607.
Jamestown, Maryland, Virginnia: these familiar US names are all derived from British sovereigns.
But, it is impossible to explain the British Empire with a dry list of dates, territories and jurisdictions.
It was a dynamic, shifting assembly of all sorts of state and non-state territories. The role of private companies and even individuals - look up James Brooke, the Raj of Sarawak, which issued its own stamps - is important.
And even when it was unequivocally the British state acting, there are a confusing number of ways that power was carried: through Crown Colonies, Protectorates, Charter Companies, and more.
And if we include the entirety of the British stamp issuing entities then we would even have to consider some short-lived military occupations that give us some of the world’s favourite rarities.
Through the heyday of the Empire from the Victorian era to the start of World War I many of these relationships become more formalised. And the postage stamp was, from 1840, very much part of that.
Twentieth century power politics
Into the 20th century, the Empire is a huge concern, with a large number of territories issuing their own stamps.
Some 20th Century British stamps are very explicit in their imperial power projection. This stamp employs nationalistic, martial imagery for the Postal Union Congress. Click the stamp to see a selection of related stamps.
The existence of the Empire is one of the reasons that World War I is fought and is certainly key to how Great Britain ends up on the winning side.
But after World War I, Empire is starting to look increasingly anachronistic.
Not least to the people who live under its rule.
Again, this is a long, complex, history that is still disputed (and very interesting and worthwhile study), so we’ll jump to some key dates as the Empire handles the inevitable switch to something less, well, imperial, and a Commonwealth is founded.
From colonies to dominions to states
From the mid-19th century, some parts of the Empire began to look more like sovereign states, though they were still under British legislative control.
These Dominions had some power to act independently, and when the Empire came together for the 1926 Imperial Conference, there were seven Prime Ministers serving the king: Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia, Union of South Africa, Irish Free State, United Kingdom, and Canada.
If you're looking for a ruling global elite you can see one here at the 1926 Imperial Conference. These are the Prime Ministers of the Dominions with King George V front and centre flanked by Stanley Baldwin, PM of the UK to his right and Canadian PM William Mackenzie King to his left.
This conference was the culmination of a series of meetings from 1911 that had sought to come to a new constitutional settlement for the Empire.
And the term Commonwealth had been used in the Anglo-Irish Treaty that founded the Irish Free State.
The Conference concluded with the Balfour Declaration (this is not the 1917 Balfour Declaration on Palestine), which gave the Dominions apparent equal status within a newly named British Commonwealth of Nations.
This was further clarified and codified at subsequent conferences and by legislation in the UK parliament The Statute of Westminster in 1931 was accepted or ratified through the 30s and 40s. Newfoundland ceased to exist and was incorporated into Canada from 1949.
Dominions started to act independently, to a degree, on the world stage.
A world beyond imperialism
As the process of decolonisation sped up, and was then cataclysmically stimulated by World War II, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Pakistan and India were briefly Dominions on their way to independence within the Commonwealth.
After the war, states that kept the British monarch as their head of state were usually called Dominions, but this faded from use over time.
The Second World War is usually accepted as the beginning of the final end of the Empire (though Britain still has overseas territories now).
The 1949 Commonwealth Prime Ministers who issued the London Declaration. George VI and Clement Atlee, the UK PM stand at the centre. The tone of the picture is very different from the earlier Imperial Conference line-up.
The 1949 London Declaration allowed India to remain within the Commonwealth while adopting a republican government. Ireland left the group by doing the same thing just before the talks started.
The name British Commonwealth was dropped and a series of titles based on Commonwealth was used into the modern era.
What is a free group of nations?
Many - though not all - countries that became independent of the Empire after World War II joined the Commonwealth.
French politicians enquired about joining the Commonwealth around the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956.
In 1961, South Africa was effectively kicked out when some ethical principles (including race equality) were added to constitutional membership requirements. From 1971, the Singapore Declaration added more political and moral rules to membership enquiries, a process that has continued to this day.
From the 1990s the process of reforming the Commonwealth from its imperial past came to something like a conclusion when countries that had never had a link to the Empire were admitted, starting with Mozambique.
In part two we'll look at the stamp issuing history of the first Commonwealth states.
The Suez Crisis in 1956, represented in this cartoon, was a major landmark as the United States' economic power forced old Imperial powers France and the UK (and US allies) to withdraw from Egypt, despite their military victories there.
Buying Commonwealth stamps today
We have major holdings of Empire and Commonwealth stamps.
It's a survey of history in postal rates and printings.
