Royal Mail - M J Daunton

The history of the Post Office involves many of the most significant themes in the social, economic and political history of Britain. Mail was carried by the new forms of transport, from the railway to the steamship to the motor van and plane. The Post Office was also the single largest employer of labour in Britain for most of the period, and had to face novel problems of controlling its vast workforce, deciding on the appropriate wage levels, coming to terms with trade unions, and facing the many problems of recruitment of boy labour, women, part-timers.

The scale of the Post Office, and its national coverage, also meant that the Post Office encountered much earlier than private companies and the difficult task of constructing an efficient adminstrative structure to control its massive operations. The Post Office might be seen as an arm of the government, used to subsidise shipping companies, to encourage imperial unity through cheap postage rates, or to provide an outlet for ex-servicemen in search of a job.

The Post Office also provides a case-study of the process by which the state, whatever its formal commitment to a policy of laissez-faire, acquired a wide range of new functions, ranging from a parcel post to a Post Office Savings Bank.

The Post Office impinges upon the life of everyone, and its performance and failings are discussed more than almost any other British institution. This book will place these debates in a longer historical perspective and in the broader context of British national history.