| Summary/Abstract |
If as anthropologists have emphasized, gifts are never free, the freighted quality of their exchange was explicit in the U.S. Japan Expedition of 1853-4 led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the object of which to compel commodity exchange. This essay explores diplomatic gift exchange during the expedition as a theater in which disputes over value were performed. Gift exchange supported licit and illicit commerce, each reflecting varied imaginations of the global: as a patchwork of militarized nation states, a hierarchy of civilizations, an grid of marketplaces, and a zone of common nature.
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