America Under the Hammer
Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values
by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
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Pub Date Nov 05 2024 | Archive Date Nov 05 2024
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Description
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.
Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.
In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Advance Praise
"America Under the Hammer is a fascinating, deeply researched, and impressive book. In it, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor reveals how auctions stood at the center of nation-making, were central to the rise of American capitalism, and helped shape early American ideas about freedom, slavery, gender, and race. This excellent book is essential reading for anyone interested in an economic history of America that positions individuals across race, gender, age, and geographic divides at the center of its analysis."
—Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
"Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor skillfully recovers the countless human stories drowned out by the auctioneer’s bark and the bang of his gavel. This smart and elegant book explodes market mythologies and confronts the social and cultural forces that made the auction room a site of both possibility and tragedy. Refusing the simple equation of price and value, America Under the Hammer is immediately atop my list of the best books on early American capitalism."
—Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
"In this thoughtful, engaging book, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor examines how public auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America became a place where ordinary citizens painstakingly began to build new regimes of value in which anything and everything could, in the end, have a price. Far from being the product of impersonal economic forces, these acts of collective valuation always remained social, even political, acts that resonated long after the auctioneer’s hammer came down."
—Stephen Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781512826517 |
| PRICE | $39.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Logan K, Reviewer
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.
