Assembling the Property Market in Great Britain, 1750-1925

FAIN: FT-61608-14

Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA 01075-1423)

This book project seeks to explain how the property market was made in modern Britain. Covering a period from 1750 to 1925, and based on the study of several institutional and cultural sites for the commoditization of property, the book argues that while land had been commercially traded well before this period, it was only in the nineteenth-century that "the property market" emerged as a coherent and visible realm of economic life. This emergence was made possible through the diverse agencies of auctioneers and estate agents, journalists, legal reformers, architects and land reform activists. In thinking about the property market as a process to be explained, rather than presumed, this research contributes to wider efforts in the humanities and social sciences to understand the economy as a historically and culturally contingent practice of everyday life.

Associated Products

The London Auction Mart and the Marketability of Real Estate in England, 1808-1864 (Article)
Title: The London Auction Mart and the Marketability of Real Estate in England, 1808-1864
Author: Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
Abstract: This article considers the cultural work of commoditization through the example of the London Auction Mart and the market for real estate in early nineteenth-century England. The auctioneers who founded this exchange sought to reconfigure the organization of property sales in an institution that would bring order and transparency to a world of informal institutions, local markets, and private exchange. The Auction Mart made visible the idea of a universal, abstract property market. At the same time, it offered a new social and cultural space in which to negotiate the often contradictory meanings of marketable property. This work of making the property market meaningful is told through institutional archives, published accounts, diaries, and estate correspondence.
Year: 2016
Access Model: Subscription Only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of British Studies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain (Book)
Title: Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain
Author: Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9780226584331
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (9780226584331)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226584331

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