Powerful empires have always developed means for efficient communication between the center and the periphery of the lands and peoples they control. Thus both the Roman and the Holy Roman Empire developed postal systems for official communication and the Tudor and Stuart monarchs sold a monopoly patent to trusted individual to run a post that enabled the monarchy to communication throughout the realm. The unauthorized use of the government post for private communications could be grounds for punishment. What developed in the 17th century, first in Netherlands and then in Britain (in 1660), was something new: a state sponsored postal system that was open to any member of the public who wished to post a letter to another. We might consider these postal systems as an early form of ‘public-private partnership’: the state used its resources to appoint postmasters, develop roads the post offices, hire packet ships, and do all the things that would improve the postal system. (See the chart at the right for the many constituents of this steadily improving British postal system as it developed over the century after 1660.) But while the state created the legal monopoly that undergirded the post, and provided seed funding for its improvement, the post was always also a commercial venture. Charges for delivered letters funded the costs of the system. The flourishing of the British postal system over the course of the long 18th century were less a result of a visionary planning than of incremental changes that produced positive synergies and new feedback loops. Perhaps the development of the 18th century postal system can best be characterized with the modern concept of ‘emergence’: improvements in the dispatch and reach of the postal system encouraged the conditions—ubiquity, literacy, and the flourishing of popular new forms (like the familiar letter and the newspaper)—which expanded the postal participation that expanded revenues making possible more improvements in the system: monthly packet ships to colonial ports, the penny post, and in the 19th century, the envelope and the stamp (for pre-payment).