Gift Exchange
The Transnational History of a Political Idea
Cambridge Studies in Law and Society Series

Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay The Gift in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss's reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonization. A century after Mauss, we may ask: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss's theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Grégoire Mallard adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that anthropology, international law, and economics have played in shaping international economic governance from the age of European colonization to the latest European debt crisis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. The history of a political idea: gifts, trusts, reparations and other fetishes of international solidarity; 2. The cast: Marcel Mauss and his legacy in the French fields of power; 3. The gift and European solidarity: Marcel Mauss and the politics of reparation in interwar Europe; 4. The gift as colonial ideology: Marcel Mauss and French colonial policy before and after the Great War; 5. Mauss's disciples in Algeria: the anthropology of the gift and the shock of decolonization; 6. Decolonizing the gift: nationalization and sovereign debt cancellation in North-South relations; 7. International solidarity and gift exchange in the Eurozone.

Grégoire Mallard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (2014) and co-editor of Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets (Cambridge, 2016). His publications focus on prediction, knowledge and ignorance in global governance.