The Progress of Literacy

I.

Literacy is inextricably linked to notions of progress. Its measurement in the nineteenth century was a means by which societies began to calibrate their advance, and in developed as well as developing countries command of the basic skills of written communication is still seen as central to economic growth. ¹ As a subject of historical study on the other hand, literacy as a narrative of progress has fallen into disrepute. The confident association of rising graphs of signatures and increasing modernization is no longer tenable. There is growing doubt about the value of quantitative evidence, and about the binary oppositions that have informed its analysis. This paper takes as a case history the creation of the Universal Postal Union and the work of its bureaucracy. ² It examines the ambitions and achievements of the organization as a means of reviewing the trajectory of research into literacy and the theoretical and methodological agenda for the next generation of historical studies.

Three quarters of the way through the nineteenth century, a vehicle was created to facilitate the use of reading and writing, which, in the words of The Times, constituted "the most practical realization which human ingenuity has yet achieved of those floating aspirations towards universal brotherhood, regarded generally as of the nature of dreams, however decorative of the pages of poetic literature" (15 August 1891: 12). In 1874, an international congress in Berne agreed to establish a body which became known as the Universal Postal Union (hereafter UPU). ³ A jumble of bilateral postal treaties was swept away and replaced by an integrated postal community. ⁴ Instead of laboriously recharging each foreign country for the carriage of mails across its territory, the signatories to the Treaty, who included the countries of Europe plus the United States and Egypt, ⁵ established a common flat-rate charge irrespective of geography or national boundary. For the domestic equivalent of a twenty-five centime stamp the peoples of the civilized world could now connect by means of their shared command of the written word.

The UPU proffered the first manifestation of what in the later twentieth century would be termed the global village. Distance and politics were to be removed from communication. Article 1 of the Berne Treaty referred to the creation of a "single territory" for the exchange of correspondence and the phrase "single postal territory" stood at the head of all subsequent treaty revisions (Cotreau 127; Sly 406; UPU, Paris 1; UPU, Vienna 1; UPU, Washington 1). As steam power accelerated transport by land and sea, time was also a diminishing obstacle. It had been removed altogether by the founding of the International Telegraph Union ten years earlier, although this remained a much more specialized mode of conveying messages. ⁶ The organization was seen by its founders as "an intimate association of the civilised countries of four parts of the world, upon one of the most important fields of action of the intercourse of nations [...] its boundaries will be no other than the very frontiers of civilisation" (Union Postale 1.1 [October 1875]:15). The floating aspirations of universal brotherhood embodied the liberal dream that once the peoples of the world could freely exchange opinion and information the misunderstandings which caused conflict would be dissipated forever. "It is a real portent," wrote an optimistic commentator in 1912, "of that great movement in favour of peace and goodwill among nations which in spite of great armies and huge navies, is leavening the life of Europe at the present day" (Bennett 227). At a more practical level, the structure of the UPU represented the prototype of the modern geopolitical bureaucracy. The instigator of the organization, Heinrich von Stephan, architect of the integrated German postal system, argued that "such a complete unanimity of the governments of the great majority of the civilised nations of the globe constitutes a fact, up to the present, unequalled in history" (Union Postale 1.1 [October 1875]: 15). More impressive than the founding Treaty, which replaced a failed attempt...