Nowherelands: An Atlas Of Vanished Countries 1840-1975, by Bjorn Berge

As someone who is at least broadly familiar with the body of work that exists about vanished or lost nations, this book is definitely among the more unusual and distinctive ones. That is mainly because this book–apparently based on the interests of its author–focuses on stamp collecting and the author’s attempts to tie the stamps (possibly forged) that he has for various polities that are no longer in existence with the history and nature of the vanished nations themselves. Some context is worthwhile here, although it must be admitted that I am no stamp collector personally. At least since the middle of the 19th century, the development of postal systems encouraged areas to claim some sort of identity for themselves and seek an international (and domestic) revenue source through the sale of postage stamps. As the author is apparently a stamp collector and is fond of some sort of process of divination by which he judges the quality of a nation in large part by the taste that exists when licking their stamps as well as the aesthetic and structural nature of said stamps (their perforations and material properties and all of that), this book’s contents are roughly equally divided between the author’s attempts to analyze the history of vanished states and the nature of their postage. If you happen to be a stamp collector or have an interest in postal matters, this book will be a lot more interesting for you than if the case is otherwise.

Although it must be admitted that in a somewhat crowded field of reflections on vanished and lost countries this book has a relatively distinctive approach, I find myself somewhat bothered by the book’s title and to a lesser extent with its graphical design. The countries that are included here as no longer existing represent areas that do exist (none of them have yet sank into the ocean, as far as I am aware), and some of the areas that are included here are rather important areas to the world today. Vancouver Island, for example, is the home of Victoria, the capital of the Canadian province of British Columbia and a fine place to visit (I have been there myself). The Orange Free State is a major part of South Africa, New Brunswick a province of Canada, and Hejaz an important part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia both with major historical sites to Islam in Mecca and Medina, the thriving port of Jiddah, and massive development at present on its northern area. None of these areas has in any way vanished despite the fact that they are no longer independent or semi-autonomous areas as they once were. In some cases, as with the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) and the Caroline Islands, the same areas included here largely exist under different names and regimes today. Admittedly, though, some of these areas remain highly mysterious, such as Inini, the largely barren interior part of French Guiana, and the area of Perak in Malaysia, as well as Sedang in Vietnam. Still, calling these areas nowherelands is unkind, and not true.

In terms of its contents, this book is a generally chronologically ordered discussion of various areas that once offered their own postage and seemed thereby to making a claim for an independent identity. Given that many of these states were breakaway regions or protectorates of larger empires or were provinces within larger nations, the status of many of these places has always been a bit ambiguous in many cases. After a brief foreword, the various former countries are included here based on the era when their stamps likely occurred and when the states failed to exist any longer. So it is that in the 1840-1860 section we have such regimes as The Two Sicilies, Heligoland, New Brunswick, Corrientes, Lauban, Schleswig, the Danish West Indies, Van Diemen’s Land, Elobey, Annobon, and Corisco, and Vancouver Island. For 1860-1890 we have Obock, Boyaca, Alwar, Eastern Rumelia, the Orange Free State, Iquique, Bhopal, Sedang, and Perak. For the period from 1890-1915 we have Ile Sainte-Marie, Nandgaon, Kiaochow, the Tierra Del Fuego, Mafeking, the Carolines, and the Canal Zone. For 1915-1925 we have Hejaz, Allenstein, Cape Juby, South Russia, Batum, Danzig, the Far Eastern Republic, Tripolitania, Eastern Karelia, and Carnaro and Fiume. For the period of 1925-1945 we have Manchukuo, Inini, Saseno, Tannu Tuva, the Tangier International Zone, Hatay, the Channel Islands, and the South Shetland Islands. Finally, for 1849-1975, we have Trieste, Ryukyu, South Kasai, the South Moluccas, Biafra, and Upper Yafa. The book then ends with notes, a bibliography, and an index after a bit more than 225 pages.