This chapter pursues two main goals. The first is to contextualize the emergence of Anderson’s localist conception of case as well as the evolution of this conception after the formative years. The second goal is to retrace the development of localist ideas in the history of linguistics, focussing on significant landmarks which precede the modern era. It is suggested that localism gains a real foothold during the rise of empiricist ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Localist ideas get sufficiently entrenched after this period to be actively debated during the 19th century up to the time of Hjelmslev. This historical part ends with the rediscovery of localism in cognitive linguistics and in cognitively oriented lexical semantics