Harry Liebersohn - The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea

The first draft of this book was written during my year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) in 20062007. I am grateful to Dieter Grimm, director during the fall semester, and Luca Giuliani, director during the spring, for their hospitality. I continued my research and writing during a stay at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in June 2008 and wish to thank Lorraine Daston, director of Section II, for her invitation to join the Institute during this time. Antoinette Burton as chair of the History Department at the University of Illinois approved an academic leave from teaching for the fall of 2009, permitting me to complete the book.

Audiences offered valuable criticisms of my ideas on gift exchange at the Philadelphia 2006 meeting of the American Historical Association; the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the Forschungskolloquium Neuere und Neueste Geschichte (Research Colloquium for Modern and Contemporary History), University of Konstanz; the Berliner Kolleg fr Vergleichende Geschichte Europas (Berlin Seminar for Comparative European History), Free University of Berlin; the Institut fr Religionswissenschaft (Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion), Free University of

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Berlin; the Canadian Center for German and European Studies, University of Montreal; The Gift in History: Symposium in Honor of Natalie Zemon Daviss Eightieth Birthday, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; and the St. Louis 2009 meeting of the Society for French History Studies.

Friends and colleagues have deepened my understanding of gift exchange and its milieux from Polynesia to Paris. I especially wish to thank Jeffrey Bowman, Mario Bhrmann, Alice Conklin, Natalie Z. Davis, Peter Fritzsche, John Gascoigne, Thomas Head, Jrgen Osterhammel, and Vanessa Smith for conversations, com ments, and all that I have learned from their writings; in addition, I thank Vanessa Agnew, Philippe Despoix, Catarina Krizancic, and Mark Micale for commenting on individual chapters of this book. Two anonymous referees provided detailed, constructive criticisms of the manuscript that greatly aided my revisions.

My research was aided by archivists and librarians at many insti tutions. I particularly wish to thank Mary Stuart of the University of Illinois Library for her stewardship of the University of Illinois history collections and Anja Sommer, archivist of the Berlin Ethnological Museum, for guiding me through the museums archival holdings. The staff of the Institut Mmoires de ldition contemporaine (IMEC) did everything possible to make my visit to use Marcel Mausss papers comfortable and fruitful. I am also indebted to librarians and archivists who made original source materials available to me at the University Library, Leipzig, Special Collections; and the University of Rochester Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

My family Dorothee, Ben, and Jack brought zest to conversations about the gift as I researched and wrote; Dorothee helped at a critical late moment with finding the right title and pulling the book into a unifi ed whole.