In Marketable Values, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon charts the transition from the preindustrialization British view of land as a form of political power and social status to the twentieth-century concept of land being essentially a commodity (albeit with peculiar characteristics, such as nonstandardization and regulations on its use). This long process of marketization entailed a reimagining of property as a tradeable financial asset with characteristics that could be encapsulated in the particulars of sale. Commodification led to rising property market turnover, necessitating the rapid growth of professional intermediaries such as auctioneers, estate agents, surveyors, and a property press—whose activities form a central theme of this study.

Marketable Values contains an introduction, five thematic chapters, and a conclusion. In chapter 1, Fitz-Gibbon discusses the development of public property auctions, while in chapter 2 he explores the rival (and ultimately main) channel of property sales, house, and estate agents. This discussion he follows with analysis of the growth of property market journalism, which charted the varying fortunes of the property market and informed a wider public about the nature and potential of this investment medium. In chapter 4, he looks at attempts to develop a central registry of land titles—one of the important steps necessary to improve marketability by clarifying both ownership and the particulars of what was actually being offered for sale.

In the culminating chapter 5, Fitz-Gibbon looks at the flip side of marketability, inalienability, to further explore another theme running through this book, the limitations of property marketability. The treatment of land and property as a standard commodity, with clearly and accurately specified characteristics and ownership, “was rarely taken for granted in the everyday practice of buying and selling property in nineteenth-century Britain” (155). Auctioneers’ descriptions, handbills, catalogues, correspondence, advertisements, and even registries and titles could only provide, at best, a stylized description of a security that was complex, incompletely standardizable, and (regarding exactly what was being sold and the legitimacy of the transaction) contestable.

Contestability was brought into sharp relief by attempts to enclose and commodify what was left of Britain's common lands, at a time when some radical liberals were challenging the very concept of real property being treated as a saleable commodity. Such debates were all the more important in an era when Britain had the greatest concentration of landed wealth of any Western nation, held by a narrow—and, arguably, increasingly parasitic—aristocracy or gentry class. Land grabs of Britain's commons by wealthy (and, in the eyes of many contemporaries, greedy) landowners, attempted closures of public rights of way (generally by the same culprits), and the destruction of ancient monuments, provoked opposition from a wide spectrum of liberal opinion. Growing organized resistance led to the first successful measures to protect commons and make properties of considerable amenity, or cultural, value inalienable—foreshadowing the larger battles among preservationists and developers and landowners during the twentieth century.

As Fitz-Gibbon's conclusion notes, by the end of the First World War not only had the process of marketization been completed, but the tide had decisively turned against the special privileges of the landed classes, with no major political party being prepared to defend either landlordism or heavy subsidies to agriculture. This produced an avalanche of land sales, ending the extreme concentration British of landownership (though the aristocracy and gentry still owned the majority of Britain's land in 1939).

Fitz-Gibbon's study is essentially a social, cultural, and political history of Britain's evolving land and property markets. It would be easy to criticize it for what it does not do. The economic history of the property market, in terms of trends in aggregate sales, prices, rentals, and yields, is not systematically explored. Indeed, tables and graphs are almost entirely absent, with what statistical evidence that is provided being almost buried within the text. Nor do we get any substantial discussion of the fortunes of property developers, speculators, and investors, despite this being a time when British central business districts (including the City of London) were being dramatically transformed. If there were Victorian and Edwardian “millionaires” who made their fortunes from these activities, this study is not the place to find them.

However, judged in terms of its own aims, Marketable Values is a useful text for anyone interested in the history of land and property markets in Britain and internationally (including some discussion of how British practice was extended to its empire). It succeeds in its task of showing how growing networks of institutions, property-related professionals, and property journalism helped to transform a country dominated by landed society into a more diverse (and eventually mass) society of property owners. The functionality and limitations of the property market remain a live political, economic, and social issue in Britain—a country that has among the highest house, commercial property, and land prices in the world. This, in turn, is due in no small part to earlier decisions regarding the limits of property marketization, with their roots in the debates explored in this study.