ABSTRACT
The first savings banks in Sweden were founded in the 1820s, prior to the advent of industrial capitalism, and long before the welfare state. Savings banks continued to be founded throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the prototypes were savings banks in Great Britain and Germany. A savings bank usually limited its activities to one parish or municipality. The kind of social and economic change described could not have taken place if certain people in the savings banks had not worked to achieve reforms, i.e. reformulation and change. The main support for mergers came generally from the managements of the larger savings banks. Modernization of the economy has brought with it strong expansion of the market and the state, at the expense of self-sufficiency and reciprocal forms of economic exchange. Institutions such as markets, businesses, the state, administrations, local economies, shared interests and popular movements are social phenomena intertwined in special ways.
