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.

“It is hard to think of an idea more immediate,” says Amartya Sen, than that of “the living standard. . . . It figures a good deal in everyday thought. It is, in fact, one of the few economic concepts that is not commonly greeted with the uncommon skepticism reserved for the other concepts of economics.”Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1. At the turn of our century, however, this was certainly not the case. A “standard of living” was neither “immediate” nor “everyday.” The term itself rarely appeared before the 1920s. Even then, observed one economist surveying her contemporaries' vocabulary and assumptions, “all the meaning, and the exact meaning, that is bound up in it” was far from clear. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10; and Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997), which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999). It could variously signify a technical measure of purchasing power, an aspiration, or an entitlement—although whether to a minimum subsistence or a more expansive notion of comfort would be bitterly disputed. For many European intellectuals of the 1920s, the term, almost solely used as “American standard,” captured in one phrase the threat or the promise of the increased economic clout of the United States, Fordism as an economic strategy, and a new politics of material abundance. On both sides of the Atlantic, all of these meanings were hotly contested by economists, reform sociologists, political leaders, and the labor movement. In short, some historical scrutiny seems in order. What did the concept mean and when? What light would a genealogy of the “standard of living” shed on the prehistory of “mass consumption” or the transition to new consumer regimes of the twentieth century?

In the 1930s, the “consumer problem” captured the attention of American working-class leaders, consumer activists, and liberal economists. As sociologist and New Dealer Robert Lynd warned, “There is a ‘consumer problem' of national proportions and it is here to stay as a big white elephant on the doorsteps of business.” He continued: “The only way that democracy can survive, if indeed it is not now too late for it to survive at all, is through the quality of living it can help its rank and file of its citizens to achieve.” Progressive reformers feared that the modern consumer was powerless in the face of corporate market manipulation, mass technology, and the maldistribution of income. Without well-informed, independent, and financially secure consumers, their argument ran, the nation risked economic and political decline. Indeed, to many Americans, the Great Depression made clear that consumers did not possess enough purchasing power to sustain the economy. Moreover, the rise of fascist regimes in Europe suggested that poverty could in fact threaten liberal capitalism. According to this conception of economic citizenship, only powerful consumers with both economic and political clout could prevent economic ruin and civic decay.Robert Lynd, “Introduction,” in Persia Campbell, Consumer Representation in the New Deal (New York, 1940), 9–10, 23.

From its origins in the industrial fairs and emporiums of the 1870s and 1880s, the department store, by the 1920s, had become a fixture of the modern cityscape and a key agent for the cultural production of the new middle class in Japan. Central to this role was the equation of the department store with the culture of consumption that became one of the hallmarks of the Taishō (1912–1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. In their search for a growing mass market, department stores worked to commodify and modernize the material culture of everyday life. In the process they sold a vision of the modern defined as the totality of consumer products available at their stores. The cultural authority of the department store assured the spread of this particular definition in the 1920s and 1930s, supplanting earlier ideas that embodied modernity in such things as parliamentary government, railroads, and a colonial empire. In other words, department stores shaped an idea of the modern that associated it with the daily practices of private life rather than the public institutions of the nation-state and industrial capitalism.For a discussion of this earlier concept of the modern, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985).

In November 1894 the new store of the Ghent consumer cooperative Vooruit was inaugurated with sumptuous celebrations. One visitor was struck by the “grandiose vision of splendor and luxury,” while another admired the “long, huge and impressive facade, that instantly caught the attention of every passer-by.”Jules Van Den Huevel, Une citadelle socialiste. Le Vooruit de Gand (Paris, 1897), 6; “Le Vooruit. La coopération et l'organisation socialiste en Belgique,” Musée Social 20 (1897):460. A cascade of similar phrases may be found in books and newspapers of the time. The ornamented exterior of the Vrijdagmarkt became the symbol of a well-functioning social democracy, lending self-confidence to this movement inside and outside Belgium.Guy Vanschoenbeek, Novecento in Gent. De wortels van de sociaal-democratie in Vlaanderen (Antwerp, 1995), 69, 76. The admiration for the building was also accompanied by critical comments varying in view and vigor. Christian-Democratic, bourgeois, and middle-class observers were shocked by the extravaganza of the cooperative store, so distant from their image of the unpretentious cooperative supplying plain goods. Radical socialists and anarchists condemned the bourgeois style of the store as reformist.Jean Puissant, “L'historiographie de la coopération en Belgique,” Revue belge d'Histoire Contemporaine 22 (1991):21–25. The new building catalyzed feelings for and against the social-democratic co-op movement at the same time as it testified to the effervescence of a booming commercial enterprise.

This essay aims to describe changes in socioeconomic conditions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that resulted, on the one hand, from a transformation of concepts about property and, on the other hand, as a result of the emergence of a consumer society under an avowedly socialist regime. This project turned out to be far more complicated than foreseen, so that this essay should be viewed as a sketch of work in progress. If I merely had subscribed to the canons of conventional communist sociology, such changes as occurred could be traced to the abolition of the old class structures.Kurt Lungwitz, Über die Klassenstruktur in der DDR. Eine sozialökonomisch-statistische Untersuchung (Berlin, GDR, 1962). However, by the 1970s and 1980s new processes of sociocultural differentiation cast doubt on this analysis even in the GDR.Manfred Lötzsch and Joachim Freitag, “Sozialstruktur und soziale Mobilität,” in Jahrbuch für Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Berlin 1981); and Artur Meier, “Abschied von der sozialistischen Ständegesellschaft,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 16–17 (1990):3–14. Moreover, in recent analyses we are faced with contradictory assessments: Some treat the changing class structure as resulting in homogen-ization, equalization, or leveling; others see it as reproducing old social differences, albeit from a different type of socioeconomic base. Unlike the former bourgeois elite, which was formed in relationship to capital, the new socialist elite or nomenklatura was constituted by its access to political power through which it in turn obtained resources and privileges.

We live our domestic lives in the presence of objects. Through our relations with them, we appraise, assimilate, appropriate, and resist the currents of our time, in a warm and willful dialogue between self and other. As goods change, and times change, so does this cultural traffic between householders and their goods change—in dominant direction, in relative intensity, in the character of the burden it carries, and in the significance we allow this burden to assume. How much material goods matter in the social and individual reckoning of well-being varies historically, and within a given time, by nation, class, and gender. How much consumption matters is a cultural difference, a shared national predicament, a politics grounded in the circumstances of class, and learned as a gendered responsibility. When producers were not paramount in the regulation of consumption, to what priorities was commerce subsidiary? How were these priorities specific by nation, gender, and class?

The fifteenth meeting of the Latin American Labor History Conference (LALHC), held April 17–18, 1998, at Duke University, began with a session on the early twentieth-century labor history of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. In “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: The Negotiation of Workers' Identities in Porto Alegre's 1906 ‘Strike of Twenty-One Days,'” Joan Bak (University of Richmond) used the surprisingly detailed contemporary press coverage to carefully reconstruct the discourses of class, ethnicity, and gender that marked one of the earliest generalized work stoppages in the capital city of Porto Alegre. The origin of the 1906 strike, she argued, grew out of three intersecting transitions: from an artisanal to an industrial mode of production; from largely hermetic ethnic communities to more heterogeneous ones with multiple ethnic groups cross-cut by an emerging class identity; and from an overwhelmingly male paid working force to one increasingly female. She demonstrated how the workers' experience as a class during the strike came to override other divisions at this critical juncture. To understand this process of class formation, she argued, one must study how appeals to ethnicity and gender interacted with this emerging class identity, and how each element served as a locus of contention and negotiation between workers and management.

In the prevailing narrative of twentieth-century American labor, the South has played an established role. The part reads something like this: Despite the sporadic efforts of Southern workers to unionize, the South remained a region of unorganized, low-wage, politically powerless workers, a region whose working people were divided by race, overwhelmed by managerial paternalism, and repressed by state and local government. Even during the heyday of Big Labor (circa 1935–1955), when industrial workers in the North and West built powerful unions, organized labor misfired in Dixie. The trend was not hard to explain. The South's repressive systems of politics and race relations, its chronically low-wage economy, and (some, excluding myself, would argue) its unusually individualistic workers—all of these created an inhospitable climate for labor unions in the New South.

On May 8–10, 1998, scholars and activists gathered at the “Work, Difference, and Social Change” conference hosted by the Sociology Department of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. The conference marked the twentieth anniversary of the “New Directions in the Labor Process” conference. The focus in 1978 was on debates in labor process theory inspired by the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. This became not only one of the most important books in contemporary Marxist scholarship but also a respected alternative to mainstream social-scientific analyses of work and industry. Contrary to prevailing perspectives of that time, which reflected the imperatives and interests of management, Braverman argued that work is systematically degraded. Employers strive to control and standardize the production process in order to maximize profit and to reproduce unequal (class-based) work relations. The conference brought together staunch defenders of Braverman as well as those who sought to move beyond the theoretical and methodological approach offered in Labor and Monopoly Capital.

The Southwest Labor Studies Association held its twenty-fourth annual conference April 24–26, 1998, on the campus of St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. The meeting, coordinated by historian Kathleen A. Brown (St. Edward's University) and cosponsored by the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), provided an opportunity for collaboration between union organizers, community activists, and labor scholars. Several general areas of interest emerged at the conference: Texas labor history; the documentation of workers' experiences in videotaped oral interviews; workers' engagement with environmental issues; various constructions of working people's identities; and the relevance of utopian visions to the future of the labor movement. In addition, local events in Austin infused the meeting with energy and a sense of immediacy.

On May 15–17, 1998, over one hundred and fifty labor historians and union and student activists attended the thirtieth annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association (PNLHA) at Portland State University. The conference was cosponsored by the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center and over a dozen labor unions and other organizations.

In the past decade or so, “globalization” has become a firmly entrenched catch-phrase in such diverse worlds as industry, academia, and popular culture. Businessmen and economists tend to laud the coming global era, while critics (including many labor historians) worry about its effects. However, both sides of the debate often share assumptions about the nature of globalization. They agree that it is a fairly new process which involves coordination of massive flows of capital, goods, and labor across national borders, the increasing impotence of national governments in regulating those flows, the increasing eradication of local cultures by a homogenous Westernized world culture, and the increasing powerlessness of local people in every corner of the world (or, depending on one's point of view, empowerment of local people through access to Western goods and ideas).

The name Volkswagen most readily conjures up images of the ubiquitous Beetle of the 1950s and 1960s, that symbol of postwar prosperity and mass consumption in Germany, of new leisure and mobility in the US, and of European competition with the once-dominant American automobile industry. But the Volkswagen automobile firm did not originate in the post–World War Two economic miracle. Rather, it was a creation of the Nazi regime and was intimately implicated in its consumerist fantasies, war economy, and slave labor policies. Hans Mommsen with the aid of Manfred Grieger has explored the Nazi origins and wartime practices of Volkswagen and its guiding figures, above all Ferdinand Porsche. This richly detailed investigation is a major contribution to our understanding of Nazi labor exploitation and the complicity of business in encouraging, designing, and implementing forced-labor practices. It is also a challenging argument about the irrationalities and inefficiencies of the fascist war economy and a complex illustration of the convoluted German path to mass consumption. The book illustrates how inextricably linked economics and politics were in the Third Reich for business as well as government, how closely modernity and antimodernity coexisted in the Nazi economy, and how complex the lines of continuity and discontinuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are.

There has been renewed interest among scholars in the study of colonial encounters between Europe and the world it dominated and helped to shape. Tensions of Empire is an important and unique contribution to this rethinking of the colonial experience. A mixture of previously published papers and new work, the book consists of an introductory essay authored by the editors and thirteen chapters grouped in four parts. This structure gives the book an internal consistency that belies its nature as a collection of essays treating colonial experiences from Southeast Asia to South Africa and the resonance of colonial engagements within the geographic space of the metropolitan powers.

This collection of essays, like many originating from conferences, is rather uneven and at times lacks focus. More problematic, the volume purports to discuss “western” industrialization, when, in fact, with but one exception it is about the nature of industrialization in Europe. Taking it on its own merits, though, this is a valuable and important addition to the growing collection of studies suggesting an alternative to the idea of a single path of industrialization. As opposed to the concept that all countries and industries went through a rapid and traumatic transition to machine production and mass production using unskilled workers, these essays demonstrate the complexities and the range of choices taken by manufacturers in a wide variety of industries and nations.

This is a fine and original study of the paradoxical relationship between declining mortality rates and rising morbidity rates among working men in late nineteenth-century Britain. Following Simon Szreter's argument, Riley provides new evidence of the positive effects of investment in the infrastructure of health services, understood as investing social capital to improve water, sanitation, and roads and to provide more medical and paramedical care for the whole population. Illnesses that were lethal at midcentury were not lethal forty years later. The period of illness lengthened, the illness recurred, but death was less likely. This is the meaning of the central contention, captured in the title Sick, Not Dead. Factors producing mortality declined but sickness rates rose. Readers should not be put off by the title, and occasionally the statistical evidence is too detailed. Nonetheless, this is a book full of insight and analytical force. Riley offers a corrective to the likes of F. B. Smith, whose view of Victorian health was a shade or two too dark.

Kathleen Paul's Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era is an important investigation and discussion of the formation of policy about nationality, migration, and race, and the concerns of those responsible for that policy, i.e., officials in the British government. Along with carefully documenting how important postwar nationality legislation was enacted, Paul makes two important arguments.

This is a useful and interesting collection of essays with an ambitious goal. By focusing on a single, but centrally important industry, the aim is to explore interdisciplinary approaches to Irish history more generally. Linen was indeed central to the economy and society of Ulster for two centuries. Developments in the industry—the spread of rural and urban domestic production, the growth of international trade, the mechanization of spinning and the rise of the factory—were conditioned by and had major impact upon farming, the decline of subsistence, the rise of market culture, household structure and family life, demography, and gender relations. Study of the industry thus creates the opportunity to break down the boundaries between historical, anthropological, economic, and sociological approaches, and Cohen's introduction emphasizes that contributors have all “contextualised their individual analyses within broader theoretical and comparative frameworks.”

Elizabeth C. Sanderson has unearthed a wealth of evidence which reveals how urban Scottish women earned their livings. They engaged in shopkeeping, running stalls at markets, roomsetting (renting lodgings), rouping (small-scale valuation and auctioneering), gravesclothes-making, midwifery, mantua making and millinery, and teaching school, as well as assisting in their husbands' trades or running businesses as widows. Sanderson points out interesting differences between Scottish and English women's status in the world of work. In England, married women, or feme covert, could not enter into contracts on their own unless they gained the special status of feme sole. In Edinburgh, women could gain the freedom of the burgh, that is, the freedom to trade, from their fathers or from their husbands. The Merchants Company and town council which regulated trade also allowed women to enroll, occasionally at reduced rates, because they believed it was important for women to provide their own subsistence. Even the wives of professionals and merchants often ran their own businesses, which would have been unusual in England. The fact that Scottish women retained their own surnames when they married may also have given them a separate identity.