Disparidades salariales en las administraciones postales de Hispanoamérica durante el siglo XVIII

This paper analyses the wage inequalities received by the employees of the Spanish-American postal administrations during the eighteenth century with the aim of examining the different reasons that explain the wage differences between the members of the postal bureaucracy. The study focuses on three postal administrations, those of La Coruña, Havana and Buenos Aires, in order to account for the dynamics of the postal bureaucracy established during the Bourbon reforms. The hierarchies of postal employees, and thus their salaries, varied according to their level of responsibility, skills and work, and the post office in which they served. The study offers a macro perspective on how communications were structured from the peninsula to the Americas and within the empire, showing how this communicational system depended on a diverse range of bureaucratic agents, whose conditions varied in each city and post office and defined their socio-economic status within local society.