Benefits of Empire

As a young boy I collected stamps, a hobby I shared with my paternal grandmother. Every Saturday we would delve into a black trunk full of stamps—a legacy of my grandfather, who had died in 1944, while my father was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Among my favourites was the two cent Canadian “XMAS 1898,” featuring a map of the world with the British possessions inked in red. The stamp’s inscription (“We hold a vaster empire than has been”) was drawn from Sir Lewis Morris’s “Song of Empire,” an ode written for Queen Victoria’s 1887 Silver Jubilee. The map, a Mercator projection that made the empire look even bigger, was based on a design by Sir George Parkin, then principal of Upper Canada College (and maternal great-grandfather to Michael Ignatieff).

The stamp is testimony to one of the advantages of empire: the imperial penny post, an official measure that allowed sending letter mail within the wider empire for just one British penny, or two Canadian...