近二十年來，對消費文化的研究逐漸從學術研究的邊緣進入核心，受到歷史學與其它不同學科的關注。西方史學界關於早期近代(early modern)的研究中，消費文化已成為一重要的研究領域，同樣地，明清史學界對消費的研究也正方興未艾。本文目的之一，即嘗試釐清明清史學界消費研究取向轉變的脈絡。其次，本文擬將明清消費文化研究成果分成幾個重要議題作檢討；並嘗試將明清消費文化研究成果放在世界史的脈絡中，以凸顯其與西方消費文化發展之異同。雖然明清消費文化的研究領域已然成形，但本文所列舉的這些議題，仍有許多疑問與爭議。更且，明清消費文化研究在開拓新視野的同時，還有一些亟待開發的面向，以及許多仍待解決的大問題，筆者在結論中擬提出兩個研究方向與三個有待討論的關鍵問題。

Over the past twenty years, research on consumer culture gradually has moved into the mainstream of academic research from the periphery; today, history and other disciplines pay close attention to this topic. Consumer culture has already become an important research field in Western historiography on the early modern period, and research on the history of Chinese consumption in the Ming and Qing is also attracting more attention. One of the purposes of this article is to distinguish the different contexts that lie behind the more or less simultaneous Chinese and Western historiographical turns to this approach. Second, this article reviews recent research on consumer culture of the Ming and Qing, which can be divided into several important issues, and tries to put this research into the context of world history in order to highlight the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western civilizations. Though the field of consumer culture in the Ming and Qing dynasties has already taken shape, many issues enumerated in this article remain unsettled and a number of academic disputes are still unresolved. More importantly, whilst research on consumer culture has opened up new vistas on Ming-Qing history, it has also led to new questions that must now be solved. This article concludes with a discussion of four critical questions in the field.