ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the nexus of neo-mercantilist relationships between the British government, its most long-established trading agency, the General Post Offi ce (GPO), and the British electronics industry to computerize some fi nancial services and hasten domestic economic modernization. It is therefore a State-directed outlier in this volume, which is dominated by commercially driven examples of computerization, and indeed is one of the few examples in which IBM played only a cameo role. Elsewhere in this volume, however, Bonin has identifi ed a neo-mercantilist preference among French fi nancial services to support their domestic offi ce machine suppliers in the 1930s and Thomes has noted the pressures from German fi nancial services on Krupp to develop bookkeeping machines (see Bonin and Thomes in this volume).
