History of Auctions Timeline

The Great Slave Auction took place in 1859 in Savannah, Georgia, and is recorded as the second largest single sale of enslaved people in U.S. history. Over 400 men, women, and children were sold from the estate of Pierce Butler, making it one of the darkest chapters in the history of auctions.

Image source: Great Slave Auction

Tobacco auctioneers in the southern United States in the late 19th century developed a distinctive rapid-fire chant that mixed traditions of 17th century England with chants of slaves from Africa, creating the iconic American auctioneer style.

Property auctions have been the subject of increased controversy during the twenty-first century as house prices sky-rocketed, raising concerns about transparency, vendor bidding, and affordability in residential real estate markets around the world.

In 2008, the US National Auctioneers Association reported that the gross revenue of the auction industry for that year was approximately $268.4 billion, with the fastest growing sectors being agricultural, machinery, equipment, and residential real estate auctions.

This form of a bidding ring was used as a central plot device in the opening episode of the 1979 British television series The House of Caradus, titled 'For Love or Money', uncovered by Helena Caradus on her return from Paris.

Image source: Auction

Between 1999 and 2002, the British government auctioned off their gold reserves through a series of transparent public auctions, raising approximately $3.5 billion. The program, dubbed the 'Brown Bottom', became controversial as gold prices subsequently rose sharply.

Image source: 1999–2002 sale of British gold reserves

The Indian Premier League started annual public auctioning of cricket players in 2008 as entertainment for mass consumption, turning player acquisition into a televised spectacle watched by millions of fans worldwide.

Image source: Indian Premier League

Following the IPL's model, the Bangladesh Premier League began conducting cricket player auctions starting in 2012, extending the practice of auction-based team building across South Asian cricket leagues.

Image source: Bangladesh Premier League

Rael Levitt's company Auction Alliance became the focus of controversy over vendor bidding practices, where sellers or their agents bid on their own properties to inflate prices. The scandal led to the company's downfall in 2012.

Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sold at Christie's New York in November 2017 for $450.3 million, becoming the most expensive item ever sold at an auction and shattering all previous records for artworks at auction.

Image source: Salvator Mundi (painting)

In 2018, the yearly revenues of the two biggest auction houses totaled $9 billion: Christie's earned $5 billion while Sotheby's brought in $4 billion, demonstrating the enormous scale of the high-end art and collectibles market.

In October 2019, Russia conducted a landmark auction of its crab fishing quotas, raising €2 billion. It was the largest auction of natural resource rights in Russian history and demonstrated the growing use of auctions for allocating natural resources.

As reported in 2020, ISIS conducted slave auctions to sell up to 7,000 Yazidi women, representing one of the most horrific abuses of auction mechanisms in modern history and part of the broader genocide against the Yazidi people.

Image source: Yazidi genocide

Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson were awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for improvements to auction theory and the introduction of new auction types, including formats used to allocate radio spectrum to telecom operators.