Gift and Gunboat: Meanings of Exchange in the Perry Expedition

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.