Briefkaart aan Philip Zilcken before 1899

This is a pre-printed postal card, probably made in the Netherlands around 1900. At first glance, it may seem mundane, but this artifact offers a valuable glimpse into the social and institutional history of communication. Consider the infrastructure required for a seemingly simple act. There’s the postal service, a state institution responsible for delivering messages across distances. Notice the pre-printed format, indicating a standardized system and a level of literacy among the population. Then there are the stamps, symbols of national identity and state authority. The stamps needed to be purchased. This implies the expansion of capitalism into the most ordinary and domestic aspects of everyday life. To fully understand this unassuming postal card, we need to turn to social and economic histories of communication, postal archives, and studies of literacy and consumer culture. By doing so, we can appreciate how even the most functional objects are saturated with the values and assumptions of their time.