Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (2011) 537-626 593

Harry LIEBERSOHN, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xii + 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00218-0 (hbk). £50.00 / $80.00.

Harry Liebersohn’s concise study charts the way in which reciprocal gift exchange as a fundamental structure of social interaction was written out of European history in the mid-seventeenth century (in theory) and in the late eighteenth century (in practice), before its influential restoration in the form of Marcel Mauss’ ‘Essai sur le Don’ in 1925.1 It is a story of periphery and centre; of the manner in which the European centre rejected the net- works of gift exchange encountered in their growing imperial peripheries as pre-modern, unsophisticated, and unenlightened at best, and at worst as simply corrupt, before the new empirical anthropology of the early twen- tieth century rediscovered the gift at the margins of the Pacific Rim, and the Trobriand Islanders, the Kwakwaka’wakw of Vancouver Island, and the Banaro people of inland New Guinea returned the gift to a centre torn apart by the First World War. It is also a story of absence; a search to explain why the great social theorists of the nineteenth century, from Marx and Engels through Weber to Mauss’ mentor Émile Durkheim, had no place for gift exchange in their conceptual frameworks. Liebersohn’s story begins with a sympathetic account of the trial of War- ren Hastings in the years 1788-1795, understood as a conflict between Hastings and Edmund Burke over the legitimacy of participation in the traditional systems of gift exchange in Bengal, where Hastings had served as Governor-General for a decade until 1784. The receipt of gifts, which for Hastings in this reading served as a mechanism of integration into local hierarchy, was viewed by Burke as nothing more than the kind of corrupt openness to bribery which had hamstrung British rule in India prior to Hastings’ appointment. The positions of both Hastings and Burke, who nonetheless recognized the social function of gift exchange in Bengali society (admittedly in an idealized manner), were soon regarded as out- dated by the new utilitarianism represented by James Mill. In this view, gift exchange per se was an antiquated block to the progress of Indian society; an inferior form of social interaction incompatible with the ratio- nal bonds established by contract, from which British administrators

1) Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le Don: Forme et Raison de l’Échange dans les Sociétés Archa- ïques’, Année Sociologique, n.s., 1 (1925), 145-279.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156852011X611526 594 Book Reviews / JESHO 54 (2011) 537-626 should not merely stand aloof (as Burke had sought), but which they should seek to eliminate. It is here, then, around the turn of the eigh- teenth century, that gift exchange left European society. In this, Lieber- sohn argues that Mauss ‘was inclined to mistake the theoretical model for the social reality’ (166) in placing the point of transition much earlier, at the start of the eighteenth century, in Bernard Mandeville’s intellectual vision of a society based entirely on the rational pursuit of self-interest. The generation of a theoretical model, which marginalized the gift and left it shorn of its reciprocity, conversely, is located much earlier than Mandev- ille, and is already to be seen in the publication of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651. Economic theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not completely blind to gift exchange. Adam Smith recognized its existence, but it did not find a place in his conceptualization of economic activity. It was instead to be explained away, either by uncovering its concealed economic function, or by considering it as an expression of generosity resultant from success in rationally-conducted economic endeavour. Only in the later nineteenth century, with the understanding amongst German theorists that economic laws were not universal but historically contin- gent, did gift exchange begin to return. The late work of the economist Karl Bücher, undertaken during the First World War, drew on the anthro- pological studies of Wilhelm Gaul to understand the roots of economic behaviour by examining so-called ‘primitive’ peoples, and anticipated Mauss by several years in recognizing gift exchange as a legitimate form of functional economic activity. Bücher had recognized the existence of complex economic behaviours outside the monetary system, and thus departed from the dominant interpretation (which he himself had shared) of the economic behaviour of primitive peoples as a kind of primordial individualism. The counterparts to that view of ‘primitives’ as self-interested individ- ualists were those who sought to find prototypical communists; societ- ies without a concept of property marked by collective action and social harmony. The American pioneer Lewis Henry Morgan had developed, based on his close observations of Native American societies, a general theory that early human society was communal in nature and matrilineal in descent, before being displaced by a capitalist structure and a concept of property to become monogamous and patrilineal, respectively. Morgan had observed gift exchange, but was unable to account for it, taking the