Historians of the working classes used not to write about consumption per se. They wrote about leisure pastimes, subsistence, cooperativism, moral economy, material life, the standard of living, even popular culture. The fact is that the constitution of the “problem” of consumption as an object of historical study is relatively recent. And initially, rightly or wrongly, it was identified with comparatively affluent societies' notions of consumer behavior and with the individualistic acquisitiveness and antisocialist political stances that went with that identification. Indeed, consumption as the main line of approach to studying working-class conditions, community, and consciousness not only seemed ill-suited to understanding people living under regimes of penury, but deeply misplaced. Insofar as consumption was about class, it appeared to be only about the bourgeoisie or the false consciousness of workers succumbing to commodity fetishism and class envy. To write about the consumption habits of the working class, as if they were similar in motivation and form to the consumption of the elites, seemed therefore to undercut the notions of class formation and consciousness as defined by relations of production and hence to be antagonistic to the very project of writing a critical history of class relations.
