The long eighteenth century is often seen as a time when consumption was driven by novelty, fashion and an expanding world of goods. This book takes an innovative approach to the supply of and demand for consumer goods in this period by exploring the nature, organisation and experience of household sales: events where used goods re-entered the market.
These sales took place in a wide variety of settings, from country houses to garrisons and from large cities to remote rural settlements. They were important economic and social events that offer new insights into the emergence of a modern consumer society and its relationship with material goods. In bringing together case studies from different settings across Europe, North America, the Caribbean and India, it offers a unique comparative perspective on an important and surprisingly neglected mechanism of economic exchange. Household sales played a vital role in the (re)circulation of household goods during this crucial period in the history of consumption. It reveals the common practices and shared desires that brought together auctions in diverse places, but also highlights how household sales were flexible events, shaped by local circumstances and priorities.
Auctions and Households in the Eighteenth-Century World is aimed at scholars and students of economic history, material culture, and consumption studies, as well as anyone interested in the social and cultural dynamics of the eighteenth century.
Auctions and Households in the Eighteenth-Century World takes an innovative approach to the supply of and demand for consumer goods in this period by exploring the nature, organisation and experience of household sales: events where used goods re-entered the market.
Introduction: Auctions and Households. Tradition and innovation in
shopping for the home Part
1. Selling: strategies, auctioneers and
advertising
1. A window of opportunity: the country house sale at Haus Hueth
in 1792
2. His debts, her future: auctions and gendered power in Colonial
North America
3. Negotiating the bid: the art and book auctioneer in
eighteenth-century Germany
4. Buying Old? Selling New? Eighteenth-Century
Auctioneers, Advertising and St Jamess Square, London
5. Empire of auctions:
advertising household sales in the Caribbean, India and England, c.1790-1810
Part
2. Buying: goods, practices and people
6. A world without stuff? Public
auctions in a colonial setting. Kingston (New York) in the seventeenth
century
7. Therefore those who [ ...] would also desire to bid for his
effects: Public auctions of household goods in the Geltstag bankruptcy
regime in urban and rural Bern (16601790)
8. Hammocks and calabashes:
auction sales of household goods at the Suriname Society Hospital
(1760s-early 1770s)
9. Genteel and modern: auctioning the household
belongings of the parish clergy in Georgian England
Bruno Blondé is Professor at the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp. His research interests include the history of economic growth and social inequality, urbanisation, material culture and consumption, especially of the early modern Low Countries. Blondé is engaged in the Antwerp Interdisciplinary Platform for Research into Social Inequality (Aipril). He co-authored Inequality and the City in the Low Countries (12002020), 2020.
Anne Sophie Overkamp is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at the Bergische University of Wuppertal. Her research focuses on economic history as cultural history, the material culture of German country houses and, most recently, the history of horticulture and botany. She is co-editor of the volume Encountering the Global in Early Modern Germany. Microhistories of Mobility, Materiality, and Belonging (2025).
Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on retailing, consumption and material culture in eighteenth-century England, from country houses through the material lives of parish clergymen to household sales. His most recent publication is Auctions and the Consumption of Second-Hand Goods in Georgian England (2026).
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