The Doubtful Gift

This study considers the nature of gift-giving in early-modern England - looking at what gifts were, how they were offered and received, and what did they mean politically under the different monarchs of the 16th and 17th centuries.

This is a valuable book.....It is a work of wide learning. It deals with a topic which, as the author states in his preface, has been much neglected in spite of the fact that biblical scholars and theologians have always paid lip service to the importance of law in Jewish life. It is a book which should be on the library shelf of every serious student of the New Testament. - Fr. Pius, O.F.M.C. Franciscan Friary, Crawley. J. Duncan M. Derrett was, until his retirement, Professor of Oriental Laws at the University of London. He has author works on legal history as well as 'Jesus's Audience', 'Studies in the New Testament' (6 vols.), 'The Sermon on the Mount', 'The Anastasis', and 'The Bible and the Buddhists'.

In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws. Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.

Using models from social anthropology as its basis, this book looks at the role of personal relationships in classical Greece and their bearing on interstate politics. It begins with a discussion of what friendship meant in the Greek world of the classical period, and then shows how the models for friendship in the private sphere were mirrored in the public sphere at both domestic and interstate level. As well as relations between Greeks (in particular those in Athens and Sparta), Dr Mitchell looks at Greek relations with those on the margins of the Greek world, particularly the state of Macedon, and with neighbouring non-Greeks such as the Thracians and the Persians. She finds that these other cultures did not always have the same understanding of what friendship was, and that this led to misunderstandings and difficulties in the relations between non-Greeks and Greeks.