The Swedish postal experience: Learning postal business by military occupation and intellectual merger in seventeenth century Europe

Open Access

Abstract

The Swedish state and its administrative organization experienced, like its European neighbours, an extensive development and transformation in the beginning of the 17th century. One part of the administration that for the first time was organised in a formal way was the postal services. This paper discuss the origins of national postal systems in relation to the development of bureaucratic and administrative state organizations. I argue that an organised postal system is of fundamental importance for the growth of the states administrative organization. The circumstances in Sweden suit well for this purpose. Sweden had grown into a co-actor in European politics at the end of the Thirty Years' War.