In this original study of the transformation of late nineteenth-century Stockholm into a flourishing industrial capital, Allan Pred reconstructs the development of Stockholm's local economy, civil society and built environment through an interpretation of lost elements of language, of forgotten fragments of daily discourse, of lost words and meanings that belonged to members of the working and periodically employed classes. Pred demonstrates how the emergence of industrial capitalism in Stockholm and the onslaught of modernization were not simply imposed upon the local arena; instead they were given their own distinctive local identity and meaning.