Uganda Cowries Stamps
February 9, 2017 11:20 PM   Subscribe

"In 1895 Ernest Millar, a young Cambridge graduate, sat in a hut in the depths of the bush in Uganda, making stamps on his typewriter. Uganda had just become a British Protectorate and George Wilson, the first government official posted there, decided that this called for an issue of stamps and a postal service to use them. The Church Missionary Society was the only organisation with a network across the country, and Millar was the only missionary with a typewriter. So it fell to him to design, and make, the first stamps."
posted by Eyebrows McGee (14 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
In the realm of Strange Passions, vintage typewritten Ugandan postage stamps isn't a bad one to have.

Man, I love stuff like this.
posted by mykescipark at 11:28 PM on February 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm so fascinated by the machinery of empire -- what an Imperial state needs to be Imperial, like Rome or Britain or America or the Achaemenid Empire or the Qing Dynasty. And the answer always turns out to be, bureaucracy, standardization, and a mania for recordkeeping. Like, a powerful military's important, and building roads is important, but any charismatic general can manage those. I firmly believe what makes you a lasting empire is an utter fixation on the minutiae of government, like postage stamps. And a system of bureaucracy such that a minor regional governor can say to a random-ass clerk, "Hey, go type 5,000 postage stamps by hand" and both the governor and clerk will accept this as an awesome idea necessary for the functioning of the empire.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:32 PM on February 9, 2017 [20 favorites]


Well both the minor regional governor and probably the clerk would have gone through the system of British all-male fee-paying private boarding schools, which was geared in large part towards producing just these kinds of men for just this purpose.

The more interesting thing to me is that the currency the stamps are denominated in isn't Pounds Sterling, but cowrie shells.
posted by kersplunk at 12:23 AM on February 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


...it would have given him more time to indulge his greatest passion: taking the latest edition of Bradshaw’s railway timetable, sent out to him every year from England – and plotting imaginary journeys to see if he could work out the fastest and most direct route.

Millar never married, though there were female missionaries there.
Ouch, sick burn.
posted by kersplunk at 12:26 AM on February 10, 2017 [8 favorites]


"Well both the minor regional governor and probably the clerk would have gone through the system of British all-male fee-paying private boarding schools, which was geared in large part towards producing just these kinds of men for just this purpose."

I know! That's part of the whole machinery! Chinese civil service exams, the Roman Army, American Land Grant Universities ... a bureaucracy has to COME from somewhere! You've got to crank out hundreds -- thousands! -- of people who would all think to themselves, "Hm, better type up some stamps."

I remember reading one of my kids' books about British war ships during the Napoleonic ships-of-the-line, Master-and-Commander era, and it mentioned that the Royal Navy allowed 22" between hammock hooks on all ships, as that was the amount of space needed for an able seaman to sleep. Someone -- or more likely a committee -- sat down and decreed that you get to sleep in 22". And I was like, "Man, that's how you run an empire." Standardize your hammocks, easily calculate your ship sleeping capacity, pay attention to extremely minor details, make all the ships do it exactly the same ... That's the stuff of empire, not military campaigns. Or go see a Roman fort, or a Roman provincial city, all just the same. Even the barracks rooms! Armies are how you get an empire, but bureaucrats are how you keep it.

Show me an empire and I will show you obsessive census records!

But yeah, the cowrie shell part is fascinating and I'm dead curious about the women missionaries who walked 800 miles in Victorian dress.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:45 AM on February 10, 2017 [14 favorites]


Pity in this context that the old story about railroad gauge and horses' asses turns out not to be true ...
posted by oheso at 1:11 AM on February 10, 2017


"....having recently finished a book on the postage due stamps of Zanzibar, 1875–1964, which took me ten years and ended up at 539 pages..."

Ah, philatelists.
posted by ZaphodB at 8:03 AM on February 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


Ouch, sick burn

Funny, I took this to mean that Ernest Millar was, as they might have said in those days, a gentleman bachelor. Though his hobby of "taking the latest edition of Bradshaw’s railway timetable, sent out to him every year from England – and plotting imaginary journeys to see if he could work out the fastest and most direct route" likely ate up a lot of his free time.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:51 AM on February 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's only very tangentially related, but any excuse for this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc which is one of my favourite things. This video helps visualise what's going on.
posted by YoungStencil at 10:47 AM on February 10, 2017


Ouch, sick burn

I took it as saying he was a giant nerd.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:35 AM on February 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


...it would have given him more time to indulge his greatest passion: taking the latest edition of Bradshaw’s railway timetable, sent out to him every year from England – and plotting imaginary journeys to see if he could work out the fastest and most direct route.

That's one that Pieter Bruegel the Elder apparently considered too challenging to represent visually, and left out of his famous painting. It is, admittedly, more conceptually abstract than stirring excrements with a stick.

posted by Naberius at 12:12 PM on February 10, 2017


Gentlemen, please, there's no need to fight. It's likely that Ernest Millar was both gay and a huge nerd.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:44 PM on February 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


I have no interest in stamps but this was fascinating. Thanks Eyebrows.

Interestingly, William Sidis was also obsessed with timetables, to the exclusion of "important" intellectual activity and the dismay of most everyone else. So to me that argues for nerdery, though not necessarily against being gay. It seems like a certain personality type gravitates towards messing about with impractical problems with complex constraints (there's also a rather direct link to graph theory).
posted by iffthen at 8:23 AM on February 11, 2017


(Though one might argue said "impractical problems" are actually at the core of the machinery of empire, a lot of the time...)
posted by iffthen at 8:24 AM on February 11, 2017


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