19th century
A01=Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
auction handbills
auctioneering
Author_Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
automatic-update
building designs
business
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=KFFR
commodities
COP=United States
correspondence
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
economic history
economy
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fluctuating property market
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
great britain
historical research
house-flipping
IL
journalism
land markets
Language_English
london
marketing
modern england
money
newspapers
PA=Available
personal archives
political power
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
public auctions
real estate
social obligation
softlaunch
trade
united kingdom
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226584331
- Format: Paperback
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2018
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The idea that land should be--or even could be--treated like any other commodity has not always been a given. For much of British history, land was bought and sold in ways that emphasized its role in complex networks of social obligation and political power, and that resisted comparisons with more easily transacted and abstract markets. Fast-forward to today, when house-flipping is ubiquitous and references to the fluctuating property market fill the news. How did we get here?
In Marketable Values, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon seeks to answer that question. He tells the story of how Britons imagined, organized, and debated the buying and selling of land from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In a society organized around the prestige of property, the desire to commodify land required making it newly visible through such spectacles as public auctions, novel professions like auctioneering, and real estate journalism. As Fitz-Gibbon shows, these innovations sparked impassioned debates on where, when, and how to demarcate the limits of a market society. As a result of these collective efforts, the real estate business became legible to an increasingly attentive public and a lynchpin of modern economic life.
Drawing on an eclectic range of sources--from personal archives and estate correspondence to building designs, auction handbills, and newspapers--Marketable Values explores the development of the British property market and the seminal role it played in shaping the relationship we have to property around the world today.
Desmond Fitz-Gibbon is assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.
