Material Culture and Everyday Life
This area studies the objects, goods, and routines of daily life in the past—what people owned, consumed, ate, and how they experienced material conditions and ordinary existence.
Definition
The historical study of the material objects, goods, consumption practices, and ordinary routines of daily life, and of the living standards and bodily experiences they reflect.
Scope
This area covers the historical study of material culture and everyday life: the production, distribution, and meaning of goods; patterns of consumption and the growth of consumer societies; food, housing, clothing, and the material conditions of living standards; and the texture of ordinary daily experience. It draws on social, economic, and cultural history, on the German tradition of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), and on the use of objects and the body as historical evidence. The approach is descriptive and interpretive, attentive to both quantitative measures of material life and the meanings people attached to things.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What did people own, consume, and use in everyday life, and what did these things mean?
- How and when did consumer societies emerge?
- How can living standards be measured through food, stature, and material conditions?
- How did ordinary people experience the routines and structures of daily life?
Key theories
- The structures of everyday material life
- Braudel's account of the slow-changing 'structures of everyday life'—food, drink, housing, dress, and technology—as a fundamental layer of history underlying economic and political change.
- The consumer revolution
- McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb's thesis that eighteenth-century England saw a 'consumer revolution', with rising demand for goods, fashion, and novelty that complemented and helped drive the industrial revolution.
- Technophysio evolution and living standards
- Fogel's framework linking improvements in nutrition and the human body—measured through height, weight, and mortality—to long-run gains in living standards and economic productivity.
History
Attention to material life has deep roots in the Annales tradition, especially Fernand Braudel's panoramic account of the structures of everyday life. From the 1980s, the history of consumption became a vibrant field, with McKendrick and others arguing for an early modern consumer revolution. In Germany, Alltagsgeschichte associated with Alf Lüdtke turned attention to the everyday experiences of ordinary people, while anthropometric history, developed by Robert Fogel and others, used bodily measures such as height to study living standards.
Debates
- When did consumer society begin?
- Historians disagree over the timing and character of the emergence of consumer society, debating whether an eighteenth-century 'consumer revolution' marks a genuine break or whether consumption grew more gradually and earlier than the thesis suggests.
Key figures
- Fernand Braudel
- Neil McKendrick
- Robert Fogel
- Alf Lüdtke
Related topics
Seminal works
- braudel1979
- mckendrick1982
- fogel2004
- ludtke1995
Frequently asked questions
- What is Alltagsgeschichte?
- Alltagsgeschichte, or the 'history of everyday life', is an approach—developed especially in West Germany from the 1980s—that focuses on the ordinary experiences, practices, and material conditions of common people, often using microhistorical methods to recover how daily life was actually lived.
- How do historians measure past living standards?
- Beyond wages and prices, historians use indicators such as diet, housing, and anthropometric measures like average adult height and body mass, which reflect cumulative nutrition and health. This approach, associated with Robert Fogel and others, helps assess well-being where monetary data are scarce.