FOCUS ON NORTH BORNEO

FOCUS ON NORTH BORNEO
The race for colonies in exotic tropical lands grew in the later 1800s. One adventurer, Alfred Dent, purchased leases in North Borneo in the 1870s from the Sultan of Brunei & Sulu and set up the North Borneo Chartered Company with a royal charter to develop the territory. It was a source of hardwood timber, rubber, rice and tropical produce. Mail was originally sent using Straits Settlements stamps via Labuan or Singapore. In 1883 the first North Borneo stamps were printed by Blades, East & Blades in London, in view of the increasing mail, and also to publicise the colony.

Sovereignty was further gained when North Borneo became a British Protectorate in 1888, and after a short Japanese occupation in WWII, a full Crown Colony in 1946. In 1963, renamed as Sabah, it joined the Federation of Malaysia.

From 1894 Waterlow took over the stamp printing, producing various series of attractive pictorial stamps. The North Borneo company organised the sale of these to collectors, selling cancelled-to-order stamps at under face value to wholesale dealers until 1912. This cast a shadow over their philatelic virtue, though encouraged many younger collectors into the hobby (including yours truly!)

Migration from China and Japan was encouraged, and Malay and Indian families also were present in business. Therefore North Borneo became a multilingual community, reflected in the English, Chinese and trade Malay inscriptions on stamps since 1925. The 1922 Exhibition celebrated these achievements. The original currency was the Mexican dollar (curiously, a common trade currency in this area), eventually matched to 9 Straits $.

Initially the stamps prepaid postage only, but from 1894 could be used for some revenue (tax) purposes too. Other tax or court fees required special accounting, hence stamps were overprinted or punched with perfin for sole use as revenues and the $25 large Arms stamps are purely revenues.