in the past mail was exchanged through an intermediate country & or each pair of countries had to negotiate a postal mail exchange treaty or deal, or you had to pay different amounts of postage, depending on which ship or carrier transported t…
in the past mail was exchanged through an intermediate country & or each pair of countries had to negotiate a postal mail exchange treaty or deal, or you had to pay different amounts of postage, depending on which ship or carrier transported the letter & needed a postage stamp for each country that the mail passed through
1863 the US Postmaster General called for an International Postal Congress , it failed as there is no nation in the world more difficult to make treaties with than France
1874 General Postal Union GPU began & a Universal Postal Congress UPC international legislative body met every five years, the first rules were
give equal treatment to foreign and domestic mail
uses a uniform flat rate to mail a letter anywhere in the world & to
accept any stamp from UPU member nations along the entire international route,
stamp values will be given in numerals, &
use; green = post cards, red = normal letters &
blue = international mail , but this was later dropped
1878 renamed the "Universal Postal Union" UPU & the sole official language of the UPU was French
1948 the UPU became a specialized agency subset of the United Nations (UN) & its six official languages with Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish & finally 1994 English
1969 if two countries had imbalanced mail flow & cost terminal dues were set arbitrarily at half a gold franc (0.163 SDR) per kilogram sent to the country that received more mail & from the country that sent more mail
1974 the UPC tripled the terminal dues to 1.5 gold francs,
1979 the UPC tripled them again to 4.5 gold francs.
1984 the UPC increased terminal dues by another 45%
1988 per-item charges were added to drive up exploitative remailing costs
1991 a 150 ton "threshold" system set separate letter & periodical rates,
1999 set GDP per capita country specific industrialized vs developing terminal dues
2010 the US voted with the developing countries to keep terminal dues low,
2012 UPU's Postal Development..
