She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values, and reported the following:
In 1786, lawyer John Antsey was sent by Britain’s Loyalist Claims Commission to the new United States of America on a mission of value. During the war, patriot governments had seized property—land, livestock, clothing, enslaved human beings—from men and women accused of being loyal to Great Britian and auctioned it off to their neighbors. Now in exile with the war over, loyalists demanded that the British government reimburse them for their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they often lacked proper receipts and made questionable assertions about their property’s value. Antsey’s charge was not only to find out how much the goods had sold for, but also to figure out what they had really been worth. Page 99 captures his frustrated conclusion about the relationship between value and price: “The Answer is always in a Circle, it will bring as much as it is worth—and it is worth as much as it will bring.”Visit Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's website.
Page 99, by summarizing Antsey’s dilemma, highlights one of the central arguments of America Under the Hammer—that value is a social and historical problem, not a number determined by the impersonal forces of the market—and in this way the test works. Antsey could discover the price paid for property, but he knew this was hardly the last word on its value. Rather, it was a product of dozens of forces that my book brings to light. Bids reflected community beliefs, personal jealousy, side conversations, pragmatic deal-making, misinformation, and many more social considerations. Auctions themselves were structured around legal conventions that were designed to uphold social hierarchies, relegating participants to the roles of bidders, bystanders, or property themselves. The shocking notion that a person could be sold in the same way as a chair fundamentally shaped the modern capitalist idea that everything has its price and that price is the measure of value. That modern understanding of markets conceals a long history of sorting out what value itself could or should mean. As they debated the nature of value in everyday life, early Americans deployed auctions to convert familial, labor, and diplomatic relationships into exchanges of goods for money.
In order to trace the history of market-oriented ideas about value, my book investigates many more types of auctions than the loyalist sales discussed on page 99. Auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America took place on street corners, courthouse steps, and even jail cells, and they trafficked in a wide variety of new, used, and living “goods.” Chapters discuss the fraught public sales of land seized from Indigenous Americans, the bargain auctions of imported overstock by which female retailers stocked their shelves, and the desperate tragedy of slave auctions. The result is a history of early American capitalism that places complex human relationships at its center.
--Marshal Zeringue
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