ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some potential interdisciplinary interfaces between historical and geographical approaches. It offers a short, selective pathway through the literature on 'modern' consumption to foreground the role of space in recent historical writing. Consumption is not a one-way street: it can lead towards public opening at certain times just as much as it can end in the fragmentation, even closure of public space. The interplay between physical space and imagined public space hints at the significance of consumption for the changing representation of space. In addition to established inquiries into the spaces of shopping and into the cross-spatial biography of a commodity, the chapter highlights three interconnected levels of inquiry: the mental space of the consumer, the imagined moral connection between consuming and producing relations, and the spillover of private practices into public politics. The use of commodities as tangible symbols of larger social and political relations across space reaches back a long time.
