"Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International Standard-Setting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference," Journal of Policy History 27, no.3 (July 2015): 416-438. (original) (raw)
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Journal of Policy History, 2015
In May 1863, representatives from the fi ft een countries that generated 95 percent of the world's correspondence met in Paris to devise a set of common standards for international postal communications. 1 Th e impetus for this meeting, which would become known as the Paris Postal Conference, originated not in France, nor in Great Britain, nor even in Prussia. 2 Rather, it was the brainchild of a little-known U.S. postal administrator-turned-lawmaker, John A. Kasson. In the previous year, Kasson had persuaded the U.S. postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, to recruit the U.S. secretary of state William Seward to convene an international meeting on postal standard-setting. Originally, Kasson assumed that this meeting would be convened in Brussels, Belgium, a logical site, since Brussels had hosted many international forums, including a statistical congress that had briefl y discussed international postal reform in 1853. 3 Yet this was not to be. At the request of the U.S. State Department, and presumably to mollify the French government, since France's geographical position gave it a central role in any international negotiation involving transnational postal rates, Kasson agreed in December 1862 to shift the venue from
The Public Image of the Universal Postal Union in the Anglophone World, 1874-1949
2018
The history of the Universal Postal Union, opined English social commentator H. G. Wells in 1940, was "surely something that should be made part of the compulsory education of every statesman and publicist." Sadly, however it remained largely unknown. "Never in my life," Wells added, had he met a "professional politician who knows anything whatever or wanted to know anything about it." 1 Wells's assessment highlighted a curious truth. Close students of public affairs have long regarded the Postal Union-the customary name for this organization before the Second World War-not only as one of the oldest and most effective of the world's international organizations, but also as one of most obscure. This essay explores this paradox. It contends that the obscurity of the Postal Union was, to a significant degree, intentional. Postal Union administrators understood that their operational success rested in large part on their ability to convince the public that, unlike generals and diplomats, they were dispassionate experts who lacked a political agenda. Had contemporaries come to regard their deliberations as partisan, rather than as neutral and objective, they risked embroilment in Great Power politics. And should this happen, they would lose the autonomy that they had attained as technical professionals. 2 In one sense the agency's low profile is surprising. For an organization established to coordinate international communications, the Postal Union devoted few resources to communicating internationally. In another sense the agency's reticence was strategic. By staying out of the headlines, the Postal Union steered clear of the unpredictable media-driven controversies that could easily have undermined its legitimacy. To show how the Postal Union communicated with the public, the essay surveys the organization's public image in the Anglophone world during its formative era, which began in 1863 and closed in 1949. The focus is on Great Britain, the United States, and three of Britain's largest settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. My primary source base is the periodical press and ephemeral items such as postcards, souvenir envelopes, and postage stamps.
Global commerce in small boxes: parcel post, 1878–1913
Journal of Global History, 2015
Even if the high-tech and ‘revolutionary’ electric telegraph has become a favourite topic for communication historians dealing with global history, it cannot alone epitomize the first modern age of globalization. The postal network, and parcel post in particular, was also a key agent of globalization. In 1880, several Universal Postal Union member states signed a convention for the exchange of parcel post, opening a new channel in the world of commerce. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of packets poured into post offices and railway stations, crossed countries, and created all sorts of transnational connections, from family to business to humanitarian relations. Behind the ordinary, seemingly low-tech small boxes lay a sophisticated service that emerged from transnational dynamics, challenged both national and international commercial circuits, and produced more complex control of economic borders.
Mastering Postal History 13 - International Trade and Postal Communications Part I
Kelleher’s Stamp Collector's Quarterly , 2019
A newly-prosperous middle class was beginning to emerge at the dawn of the Age of Exploration. Mercantile political and economic theories notwithstanding, it was the importation of goods, rather than exports, that was important. The Age of Exploration was not about military or imperial expansionism. It was about trade. The great trading companies of this period were granted monopolies by European monarchs and roamed the seas to Africa and Asia. These firms had fleets of privately-owned ships. The trading companies’ representatives, the ship officers, and crew all relied upon the mail for communications back to the home countries. This paper views the birth of international trade through the lens of postal history.
History of the International Telecommunication Union, 2020
and the Limitations of the International Telegraph Union as a Global Actor in the 19205 The Great War of 1914-1918 transformed the relationship of the United States to Europe, creating a raft of new opportunities for commerce, diplomacy, and public understanding. Among the public figures to find these possibilities inspiring was Walter S. Rogers, a liberal journalist dedicated to the cause of improving the quality of foreign reporting. Rogers was best known to the public in 1918 as the director of a New York City-based international news service that he operated for the Committee on Public Information, the government's official news agency. Rogers fervently believed that the foreign press was systematically distorting US news by foregrounding sensationalistic atrocity stories and underreporting uplifting accounts of current events. To set the record straight, Rogers oversaw an ambitious government project to feed foreign journalists carefully curated news reports that they could then run in their own publications. 1 Rogers's wartime experience led him to promote a journalism-centric liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism was not new in 1918. Yet it received a boost from US President Woodrow's Wilson eloquent paeans to freedom and democracy, as well as the high hopes with which many invested the diplomatic ne
Smithsonian Contributions to History and Technology, 2022
During World War I, the United States government sought to suppress the activities of union members, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals viewed as disloyal and disruptive to the war effort. In the aftermath of the war, the U.S. government’s efforts to quell radicalism reached new heights, including mass raids and deportations headed by the Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Immigration. The U.S. Post Office Department also played a vital, yet understudied, role in wartime and postwar antiradicalism. Using records from the National Archives concerning the Espionage Act, this paper examines the Post Office’s antiradical activities during and after World War I. The Post Office curtailed the ability of individuals, labor unions, and political organizations to communicate a range of dissident ideas through the mail. It also provided evidence for the prosecution and deportation of radicals for unlawful speech. The Post Office played a pivotal role in a period of ideological censorship and persecution that became a turning point for American discourses on loyalty, free speech, and civil liberties.
After two months of meetings in Paris, twenty European countries came to an agreement and founded the Telegraph Union (TU), on 17 May, 1865 . It was not only the first supranational organization, but also the first to supervise and govern an international public service. Furthermore, the Union’s administrative structure was extremely modern, based on periodic meetings (Conferences) flanked by a permanent body (International Bureau of Telegraphic Administrations). It actually invented the structure that all international organizations have since adopted: 1) a secretariat for constant communication with all members; 2) plenary conferences for establishing common rules. Between 1865 and 1875, a series of plenary conferences gave shape to the international telegraph network and determined: 1) standard technologies of communication; 2) rules common to all the countries; 3) common tariffs and anti-dumping rules. They were all the results of politically, socially and culturally determined decisions taken by the delegates present at the conferences. What happened was these international “constitutive choices” structured a new core and new peripheries based on who was included in or excluded from the international telegraph network. Our first section will therefore define the subjects and players actually responsible for the constitutive choices made in the conferences. The second and third sections will illustrate two areas, the homogenization of norms and anti-competition regulations, which more than others contributed to tracing out a new “core/periphery” dichotomy in communications.
Private Mail Delivery in the United States during the Nineteenth Century: A Sketch
1986
The post office is an anomaly for business historians. The delivery of mail is a potentially lucrative business that could, at least in theory, be undertaken by private enterprise. Yet historically private postal systems have been not the rule but the exception, and in every major industrial nation today mail delivery is undertaken by a monopoly that is run either directly by the government or, as in the United States, by a quasi-governmental public corporation.
The mid-nineteenth century postal reform movements in Great Britain and the United States were superficially similar, yet substantively different. The similarities were obvious. In both countries, postal reformers called for a radical reduction in postal rates, an innovation that they termed "cheap postage." In both countries, cheap postage was dependent on the enactment of legislation, since, at this time, both postal systems were owned and operated by the central government. In both countries cheap postage became law: in Great Britain, postal rates were restructured in 1840; in the United States, in 1845 and 1851. And in both countries, cheap postage led to a huge increase in the number of letters sent through the mail at a time when letter-writing was the primary medium for the circulation of long-distance information by the general population.