Stamps of the British Empire: A World Tour

This album was built the old-fashioned way: typed German catalog notes clipped and glued beside the stamps themselves, hand-painted maps marking out each territory, and the occasional postal-history cover tucked in for good measure. It follows the old geography of the British Empire — not modern borders, but the crown colonies, protectorates, condominiums and mandates as they actually issued stamps, from a tiny North Sea island traded to Germany in 1890 to a scatter of Pacific atolls that only got their own definitives in the 1970s.

We've kept the album's own logic: each entry below is a territory as the collector defined it, with the historical note translated from the original German and the stamps described as they appear on the page. Browse by region below.