It used to clear that unlike other collectibles such as postcards, or match-books, postage stamps were issued exclusively by governments, or entities that had government status. Their purpose was the collection of pre-paid tax for the transmission of mail. 

​

Today the distinction is not always so clear. There are many territories listed by Stanley Gibbons in an appendix to their catalogues whose issues, it believes, "are essentially intended for foreign collectors": i.e. no postal use was ever intended and whose production is usually off-shore with the stamps sent direct to dealers, and rarely, if ever, to post offices!

​

Examples include territories such as Fujeira, Khor Fakkan, and Umm al-Qiwain, in the United Arab Emirates - where the stamps were never valid for postal use; Redonda in Antigua, which has no post office but issues stamps, or Tuvalu that issues a volume of stamps out of proportion to its population. 

​

But historically, and even today, most countries issue stamps that do have postal use as their purpose, but are also a representation in miniature of a territory, sovereignty, its history, values, interests, and identity.  

​

V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad born novelists, travelled widely and in his book "A Bend in the River" set in East Africa - then under British Colonial rule - he wrote: Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things: there was one called 'Arab Dhow' [probably the Kenya Uganda Tanganyika 1935 5 Cent green and black  showing a dhow on Lake Victoria] It was as though, in these stamps, a foreigner had said,'This is what is most striking about this place'. Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken dhows for granted. Whenever  I saw them tied up at our waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not quite modern and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed in our own modern docks". (Published by Deutsch, London, 1979). 

​

In a similar way postage stamps may also mark a passing of countries and empires. Carinthia,  Fiume, Heligoland, Marienwerder, Saar, and Vrijheid, are redolent of states that flourished briefly before they were subsumed into larger entities. Ghana, Malaysia, Myamar, Sri Lanka are examples of states where the name on the stamp symbolizes independence from previous colonial rule. 

​

The Australian author Angelo Loukakis’s parents came from the island of Crete (Greece) and he is acutely aware his ancestry. His novel, "The Memory of Tides", has the backdrop of the 1940 battle for Crete. 

Of this novel Loukakis writes: "I wanted to show the extraordinary and positive relationships that were formed between Greeks and Aussies at a time of profound crisis. There were many instances of cross-cultural revelation during the Greek campaign. For humble, frightened village people an awakening and relief—they could scarcely believe that complete strangers would come from across the world to try to protect them from the Nazi tyrants. For Aussie boys, an awareness of a culture that had given birth to the very things they were fighting for—freedom and democracy."

(Whitmont, Scott (6 January 2007). "The Memory of War: Interview with Angelo Loukakis". Australian Bookseller & Publisher)

​

In a similar way he reflected on his early interest in stamp collecting: "A traitor to my origins, I suppose, I was much keener on British Empire stamps than I was on Greek or European ones....But stamp collecting, like nicking off after school, ended for me a long time ago. And the Queen no longer matters except as a side-show, and the British Empire has vanished." ("The Royal Arcade" Good Weekend, 18 March 1988)

​

Except, of course, that in the world of philately the 'British Commonwealth' has certainly not vanished.