One of those books where frequently a paragraph could be elaborated into its own book, America Under the Hammer is a history of auctions in the early United States, starting with the colonial period and moving into the mid-19th Century.

The book is conceptually broad, because each of the chapters focuses on a concept, making a summary difficult. It is also frustrating in a 'this is water' sense in trying to use language shaped by a thing to describe the thing itself.

In general, the thesis here is that auctions reflected, but also codified, a view of the world that exists now, the world as existing within a capital E-Economic paradigm. This would also buttress commonly held views about gender and race. It is almost performative, as something like the rules around the management of an estate, including such things as how the widow was treated in relation to the estate, what property mattered how, and how the question of property extended to the enslaved, are all public acts that show (and encourage) a way of looking at the world and the people in it.

The most chilling points are about auctions of tribal land, or the real and personal property of Loyalists during the Revolution. There are more important points in the book, but here is where the implied violence of what is going on is the clearest. The weakest part is the chapter on the auctioneers themselves. Part of this is structural: this chapter bridges the post-Colonial focus and the mid 19th Century focus. But it is also the least persuasive in treating agency as a business concept in an idiosyncratic fashion.

The writing is colorless and restrained. I like this, but it may put off some readers. The only strangeness to it is that it was hard to tell whether the author was making a strong or weak version of the argument. Poorly stated, the question is how intentional or considered some of this is. Part of this is the burden of doing history conceptually rather than laterally. But the final result is satisfactory.

To damn with faint praise, the book is good because even if you would ditch all the sociology, the history is cool. As is usual for a good history, the facts as things happened defy easy explanations and conventional wisdom. There is a way that this book is more like a series of micro-histories on a related topic. I think that might be missing the point, but the 'did you know' quality here is particularly high, which keeps it a pressing read.

My thanks to the author, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, for writing the book and to the publisher, University of Pennsylvania Press, for making the ARC available to me.