Postage stamps and postal history of the United States a precondition for their issue by a nation was the establishment of standardized rates for delivery throughout the country. If postal fees were to remain (as they were in many lands) a patchwork of many different jurisdictional rates, the use of stamps would only produce limited gains in efficiency, for postal clerks would still have to spend time calculating the rates on many letters: only then would senders know how much postage to put on them. The introduction of postage stamps in the UK in May 1840 was received with great interest in the United States (and around the world).
Postage stamps and postal history of Turkey 63 domestic post offices in the entire empire, and service was sporadic and slow. On January 1, 1863, the Ottoman Empire issued its first adhesive postage stamps. It was the second independent country in Asia to issue adhesive stamps, preceded only by Russia in 1858, and two British colonies, Scinde District of India in 1852, India itself in 1854 and Ceylon in 1857. The Ottoman Empire's stamps came less than two years after its neighbor and former territory, Greece (independent 1832), issued its first stamps. The design consists of the tughra, the emblem of sovereignty, for the then current ruler