Postgång på växlande villkor : det svenska postväsendets organisation under stormaktstiden

Sammanfattning: This dissertation investigates the Swedish postal service, focusing on its organization from approximately 1600 to 1720. The purpose of the study is to explain why the Swedish state, at different points of time, chose one form of postal organization over another. The principle question of the dissertation has been: How was the Swedish postal service organized during the 1600s, what were the forms of organization chosen, and why did the state shift between these? In a broader perspective, the dissertation has investigated how the answers to these questions affect our perception of how the Swedish state organized its agencies in the seventeenth century. The analysis relies on a theoretical model inspired by economist Oliver E. Williamson’s transaction cost theory, modified to function for a study of seventeenth-century Swedish society. The concepts “market” and “hierarchy” is central to this theory. They denote the ways in which enterprises and agencies can be organized. How choices can be made between the two alternatives has been explained by the aid of a transaction cost analysis. The concept of market has been reformulated in the dissertation, and instead of market, the term “contract” has been used. This term denotes an organization where the crown handed over the leadership of the postal organization to some private individual. The analysis focuses on the shifts between the state’s centralized control of the postal organization, labeled hierarchy, and the above-mentioned form of contract. The principle question is why these shifts in the organization of the postal service took place, and what changes these shifts entailed. The investigation is based on a wide variety of sources, complementing material from the central administration — e.g. minutes, ordinances and fiscal material — with, for example, letters written by persons who were central actors in the Swedish state. The dissertation shows that the Swedish postal service during the 1600s was organized according to both contractual and hierarchical principles. During the period under research, the postal service alternated between being incorporated into the government administration and being contracted out to some private individual. The state occasionally relinquished control over the postal service, leaving it to entrepreneurs to handle. At other times, the state centralized the postal service’s administration, putting it under direct government control. The investigation has problematised a formerly standard picture of the Swedish postal service. Hereafter, the Swedish postal service must be regarded as an organization in which both models coexisted. The Swedish state tried both contract-oriented and hierarchical organizations during the 1600s; indeed the organization oscillated between these two poles.