One can observe a confusion about gift exchange among late eighteenth-century makers of empire, who could not live with it and could not live without it. James Mill a generation later tried to put an end to the uncertainties surrounding gift giving in India by refusing to admit that it existed at all except as another name for corruption. In the liberal utilitarian tradition that he represented so robustly, British governors and Indian princes who exchanged gifts were furthering nothing but self-enrichment, which was poorly disguised by excuses about local custom or recognition of social rank.

Marcel Mauss, concluding his essay on the gift, thought that this kind of utilitarian incomprehension represented a turning point in modern history. He opposed the utilitarian “notion of interest, of the individual search after what is useful,” to the gift. This conception of the useful, he wrote, hardly existed in indigenous societies around the world, or in the classical world, or in Europe itself as more than a subordinate principle until a few centuries ago. “One can almost date – since Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees – the triumph of the notion of individual interest.” Thus, Mauss offered a starting point for the theoretical controversies culminating in his own essay: the theories of economic self-interest first clearly stated in early modern England.

I began this book with an interest in writing about civility in politics – about the habits and conventions that can acknowledge the humanity of one's opponent, however bitterly contested the relationship may be. It was a subject that did not fit into any of the ready-made areas of study within my native ground of European intellectual history. As I looked around for a way to give past shape to my present preoccupations, I found myself gradually drawn to Marcel Mauss's famous essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925). His essay was my point of entry into the larger history of gift exchange as it disappeared from and returned to the conversation of modern Europe.

Mauss turned to the practices of “archaic” or indigenous societies with an eye to the conflicts of his own time, when four years of total war had gone far toward destroying elementary civilities. What he found in premodern societies was a different principle of social organization. In Oceania and the Pacific Northwest, the central sites of his essay, gift giving was a system of mutual obligations. His famous definition asserted that it was always reciprocal, contrary to the modern assumption that a gift implies something given without expectation of a return. Mauss's analysis wove individuals and groups into ongoing patterns of giving, accepting, and returning that involved all aspects of the society in a network of shared responsibilities.

Historians have singled out the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period of broad cultural transformation. In addition to the obvious changes of the period – the “dual revolution” (Eric Hobsbawm) in politics and economics that go by the names of French Revolution and Industrial Revolution – this was a moment when ancient European habits and assumptions about the world were undermined and gave way to new ones. Even before 1789, when the world visibly turned upside-down, old ideas took on meanings that presaged a new era for Europeans and the rest of the world. More recently global historians have argued that this was a watershed moment not just for Europeans but also for civilizations and peoples around the world: C. A. Bayly has delineated the decay of old empires and invention of new ones in China, India, and elsewhere, out of a mixture of internal crisis and response, often innovative, to pressures from European merchants and arms. These changes were the setting for uncertainties and dramas in the face-to-face encounters between European and non-European cultures and how those encounters were interpreted on both sides. One way of acting out these controversies was through the kind of reciprocity that we now broadly identify as gift exchange.

Hastings and the Gift on Trial

One day late in the eighteenth century – the century of wigs and silk stockings and privilege based on birth – English society took the measure of its destiny at home and abroad in a public trial.

Around 1900 there was a movement within european culture to get in touch with the instinctive creativity of archaic cultures – as some intellectuals imagined it. The writings of Nietzsche inspired artists and intellectuals to turn to “primitive” peoples for a vitality missing from European society; the new availability of indigenous art in Europe's expanding ethnological museums provided inspiration for movements like Expressionism in the visual arts; steamships, global trade and colonial governments made it possible as never before to visit and live in places like North Africa and Oceania. Most artists and writers knew little about non-European peoples and understood them only superficially even after visits abroad; their primitivism generally appropriated indigenous art for modern European purposes. Nonetheless, their appreciation of indigenous art suggests a nascent receptiveness toward peoples generally approached with ignorance and scorn by Europeans.

Leading sociologists of the prewar era like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber made use of the information about peoples around the world that was pouring into Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they remained primarily interested in the problems of industrial societies. Other social scientists like Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Richard Thurnwald actually lived with tribal peoples and developed new methods for analyzing the specific institutions of their societies. While not entirely free of the evolutionary models and cultural presumptions of their age, they set in motion a fresh empiricism for understanding peoples of North America, Oceania, and other parts of the world whom Europeans governed with the intellectual aid of little more than cultural cliché.

The liberal tradition mapped out the logic of a modern society made up of emancipated individuals, who might voluntarily join together for different purposes but who retained a high degree of freedom to pursue their individual ends. An antitraditionalist like Mandeville who wished to affirm the emerging freedoms of modern society could do so with little or no reference to the gift. Thinkers with greater breadth could ponder the inadequacies of a society that ran only on self-interest; they could appreciate the mutual obligations of traditional European society and the important place of voluntary acts of generosity in modern society. But gift giving remained a secondary topic, a historical memory or a corrective to modern society's unprecedented freedom from the past's dense network of dues. As late as the eighteenth century, Europeans went from one gift-giving society – their own – to other gift-giving societies overseas. But by the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans had little comprehension of the colonial societies they were attempting to subdue and rule. Even though gift networks had by no means disappeared at home, pragmatic administrators, soldiers, and businessmen had difficulty understanding the rudimentary social expectations of the people they were supposed to turn into peaceful, productive subjects. A sophisticated social scientist like Karl Bücher struggled with limited success to understand the nonmarket rules of indigenous economies.

The discoverers of gift exchange had no special talent for gift giving. In their fieldwork, the founding anthropologists preferred cash or its local equivalents to extract information and artifacts. Boas paid cash for Northwest Indian artifacts and for the services of George Hunt. Thurnwald made a point of avoiding gifts and keeping his relationships with his local aides business-like, making a mess of things when he made a present of a suit to his Banaro informant, Yomba. Malinowski bargained with islanders and worried like any tourist that he was being cheated. As in many commercial transactions, impersonal calculation may have been intertwined with friendship or other motives of gift exchange. Nonetheless, the anthropologists were unreflective about their methods of doing business and whether they might have learned more by entering into gift networks.

They were far less sensitive to the place of gift exchange in their own lives than Hastings in India a century before. Unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, they did not inhabit a Europe of gift relationships that were as necessary as the air for their survival; in their modern societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, business dealings seemed natural and sufficient. They encountered systems of gift exchange as foreign; hence, when Malinowski wanted to bring home the kula ring to his readers, he had to reach for the fusty example of royal heirlooms – a particularly nostalgic choice in the wake of the world war that turned the Russian, Austrian, and German monarchies into living memories.

Marcel mauss sketched a pattern of gift giving that was deceptively simple and inexhaustibly rich: By breaking gift exchange down into the steps of giving, receiving, and reciprocating, he avoided the errors of less skilled and schooled predecessors and created a new kind of theoretical concept. Instead of developing the gift historically from ancient to modern examples, as German writers from Grimm to Bücher had done, he presented the different dimensions of a unified social institution. This model could be applied to different times and places, accommodating them and explaining them in ways that made fresh sense. Over the course of the essay, the gift looks ever more complicated as one sees it in new settings. Weddings in Polynesia, the kula in the Massim, and the potlatch in the Pacific Northwest formed a fruitful paradigm. From there Mauss moved with confident expertise to Rome and Germanic Europe and beyond to ancient India; leaving the past he returned to the Europe of his own time with his suggestive remarks about mutual obligation and social democracy. His personal experiences, politics, and contemporaries' scholarship came together in his idea of the gift.

However, as we have emphasized from the beginning, Mauss's essay is only part of a broader history of reflections and possibilities for thinking about gift giving. We can re-immerse the gift in this discourse and expand its historical and conceptual dimensions.

The period from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century forms a distinctive era in the history of scientific ethnographic writing. A double framework of technological and political change demarcates its beginnings. On the technological side, advances in mathematics and scientific instrument making facilitated accurate navigation over the thousands of miles of a world sea voyage. On the political side, the era opens with the British victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War (in its North American theater, the French and Indian War), which was ratified by the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763. This conclusion to one contest set off a new round of competition between the two great powers, who now played out their rivalry in the vast, hitherto imperfectly charted expanse of the Pacific.

State-sponsored French and British voyages soon set out to scour the far side of the globe for layover stations on the journey to Asia. Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811), a mathematical prodigy who had served Montcalm’s expedition during the disastrous concluding phase of the struggle for North American hegemony, led a world voyage from 1766 to 1769. On the British side, James Cook (1728–1779), who had distinguished himself as a surveyor-hydographer in Newfoundland, led three scientific voyages around the world from 1768 to 1771, from 1772 to 1775, and from 1776 until his death in Hawaii. These and other “scientific voyages” of the late eighteenth century served imperial aims by providing accurate charting of island locations and coastlines, one of the most remarkable achievements of the officers and scientists who risked their lives on wind-driven odysseys to the ends of the earth.