My Commonwealth Classic Stamp Collection

I would like to show you my collection of classic Commonwealth stamps. I have been getting these stamps in recent months, going almost every day to an old antique store to search through old albums and boxes full of stamps. Unfortunately the little store is no longer there and I am no longer finding anything to continue forward…. Although I hope that it can still surprise me.
On the other hand, I would say that I do not dislike stamps even if they are in poor condition, which is why many specimens do not meet beauty standards. Some are unclassified, either because they arrived recently or because they are giving me some trouble classifying them, others I probably haven't got right either since there are very complex specimens... Although I know of some cancellations, I have not yet found information on most of them, I would appreciate help in this regard if anyone recognizes any interesting cancellation.
I hope you like them, if any specimen catches your attention I can try to do a better scan.

Nice collection! Thanks for sharing.

You have some fun studying ahead. There are some interesting cancels in there.

Thank you!! I am delighted to share it with you...I have no other friends or acquaintances to show them to, no one around me collects stamps...
For me they are all very beautiful, and their eras, designs and origins arouse a lot of emotion in me, in some cases they are like small windows to those places in a past time, and with one look I can travel to the beaches of Jamaica surrounded by palm trees or in front of the mysterious sphinx of Egypt...

Much that can be invoked beyond beaches and pyramids when collecting these stamps.

In the second half of the C19 alone, over sixty colonial wars were launched by Britons establishing political control over southern, Western and Eastern Africa, Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East. Colonel Callwell wrote a famous field guide to winning such 'small wars' as the British called them. But these invasions, expeditions, raids, battles and massacres were anything but 'small' in their consequences for the people killed, displaced and subjugated and for the societies broken by them. It is impossible to calculate how many people were killed in Britain's imperial conquests between the C17 and C20, since they were never systematically counted, but from the estimates we have of recorded conflicts, it is safe to say they number in the millions.

The occupation of settlers – the second part of the definition of colonialism, resulted in the decimation of indigenous peoples, as a result of both newly introduced disease and violence. Through meticulous ongoing research we now know, for example, that Aboriginal Australians were displaced from their land not only by smallpox, but also with the assistance of hundreds of separate, small-scale massacres, breaking up particular groups or clans. Those First Nations, Native Americans and Aboriginal people who survived the occupation were forced to give up their cultures and even, in many cases, their children, so that they could be assimilated to the new, White colonial society.

The third part of the definition of colonialism – economic exploitation – took various forms within the British Empire. Perhaps the most notorious was the capture and trafficking of over 3 million people on British ships, out of a total of 12.5 million, to be used as slave labour in the commercial plantations of the Americas – a form of slavery never before seen in human history. The sugar, tobacco, cotton and other commodities that this chattel workforce produced was part of a process that transformed three continents. Between the C16 and the mid C19, much of Africa was destabilised as African polities either participated in the trade by selling captives or succumbed to raids themselves; the ecology of the Americas was fundamentally altered as commercial plantations replaced indigenous plant species, and indigenous peoples were displaced, while Europe embarked on its Great Leap Forward with the assistance of the capital earned through the domination of enslaved labour. While the Arab slave trade had operated across much of the eastern side of the continent for a millennium, its effects were nowhere near so far-reaching or transformative of the world economy. But while the slave trade is the best-known example of economic exploitation, and was of course brought to an end by campaigners in Britain in 1807, there was also the exploits of the East India Company. Once it had ceased to be a viable commercial trading entity, its business model consisted of extracting rent from Indians to send to British shareholders as dividends, and enforcing the production of opium in India, to smuggle into China, with which to buy tea for the European market.

The connections forged by these forms of colonial economic exploitation were truly global. The tea brought from China with narcotics from India was drunk in Britain sweetened with the sugar grown by slaves in the Caribbean. And those slaves were generated in turn partly by bringing cloth from India to trade for captives in Africa. Finally, when the British government was the first among European nations to free slaves in the Caribbean in 1833, the shortage of labour on Caribbean plantations was resolved by resorting to India again, for the recruitment of 1.5 million impoverished British subjects under indentured labour contracts.

So, I am afraid, like it or not, the study of British colonialism contains things that nationalists who believe in the timeless, fundamental goodness of Britons, really don't want to hear, but which are essential to understanding how the whole system of empire came to operate. We may want to focus mainly on the British abolition of slavery, and indeed that's largely what we have done until recently, but we have to recognise that it was only a small part of the story. It gets worse though.

Having established these three elements of colonialism – political control, occupation and exploitation – the modern European empires including Britain's did something else that was quite novel. They associated status in their colonial societies with race, pioneering what we know today as racism.

Well, maybe I should burn them for being part of such a terrible story... and I thought I was clearing my conscience by staying away from Leopold of Belgium's stamps...

On the contrary. Philately is such a powerful hobby when it comes to evoking history both good and not so-good. Just as life is not a bucolic fantasy land of roses and candies neither is World history. Why burn something because it interferes with an idyllic. If you want to see sunny beaches one day and colonialism the next you can. Don't get trapped in the prison of two ideas where it has to be all one or all the other.

You can read the rest of rogdcam's post here:

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ETA: I guess I'm still within the window of editing, so I'll nuke this link.

Thanx CJD! It was supposed to be in quotes.

Very lovely collection Murasama

I do like the sphynx and pyramid issues!

I can't see the necessity of posting Lester's article on this thread. Shouldn't this discussion be in another part of the forum?

Regarding Lester, I wish it wasn't here. I felt it was worth identifying where the copy-paste originated. I might have been wrong.

I am OK with a moderator removing it. I certainly did not mean to post speech or thoughts that make anyone uncomfortable or with which they disagree.

They are pretty stamps. Most of the BC stamps are IMHO. Can you say pretty? Or should it be "handsome"? Or maybe "good looking"?

Murasama, it's easy to look for China cancels on Hong Kong stamps. Gibbons has listed these for years, and Scott Classic Specialized added them a while back. They don't always agree on pricing (at least relative pricing).

If you want to go crazy with these, look for a copy of Moo's Hong Kong Treaty Ports, Firm Chops, Perfins and Postage Cancels Stamps Catalogue.

That's a nice collection you've formed @murasama. #128522;

I've certainly struggled with balancing my love of the design of classic stamps and the colonial baggage that goes with them, especially as I go further along my reconciliation journey within my own community. I still struggle with it, but I'd rather use the old stamps to tell a richer, more thoughtful story than eliminate them completely.

Totally worth a deeper, nuanced discussion in another thread, rather than choosing Murasama's post as the ignition point on a forum full of colonial material! Yet I worry that we are not exactly in the golden age of caring, nuanced online discourse. (the big We, not a specific person here. #128150;)

I understand the historical colonial concept, not just British…and not just modern or contemporary…with the terrible damage done to populations and cultures throughout the world over the centuries since the remote past. But I consider the stamp as part of a means of communication that is involved in the events of its time, which may be printed on it, but not as a main actor of brutality. I do not see in its design a strict colonial purpose, since this basically (the effigy of the queen or king) is the same for all the inhabitants of the empire, and even shows significant places, monuments or part of the indigenous culture…in addition, without a doubt, good and bad people were involved in the upheaval of their time, just like the stamp.
Through the neutrality of the mail, the colonial impulse has been moved but also the will to paralyze it, death sentences have traveled, but many lives have also been saved. In addition, colonization, like many of the great monsters of history, made humanity pay a high price by filling it with shame as a species, but left behind great advances for it in many fields.
I really don't mind discussing these things, because as I have already commented, I myself have a lot of reluctance to Leopold's Belgian stamps...
A curiosity I will tell you, one of the stamps that I like the most is the SG#43 from Newfoundland, I like its color, its design, everything seems attractive to me... but it also made me think a lot about the seal slaughters, and it also has some strange marks, which remind me a lot of blood (I would say it is blood).. I was about to get rid of it but I resisted the impulse... for the moment.

Almost any country will have a tainted history. Some even have a tainted present. So, let's burn all stamps.