Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The mark of a civilized economy is national money; the English pound, the Australian dollar, the Indian rupee. The mark of a savage economy is untamed money in the form of cowrie shells, silver, gold and so on. The state's power is critically dependent on its ability to domesticate savage money and to reassert its control. This is a constant struggle and especially so for an imperial state with ambitions of international statehood. The English pound conquered cowries and silver at the end of the last century, and the American dollar almost succeeded in domesticating gold, the last vestige of savage money. However, a new era of savage money is dawning in the twilight of the American empire. "Money" has an equivocation rather than a definition. It is a chameleon-like symbol which is forever changing as mercantile relations between people vary over time and place. This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.

The mark of a civilized economy is national money; the English pound, the Australian dollar, the Indian rupee. The mark of a savage economy is untamed money in the form of cowrie shells, silver, gold and so on. The state's power is critically dependent on its ability to domesticate savage money and to reassert its control. This is a constant struggle and especially so for an imperial state with ambitions of international statehood. The English pound conquered cowries and silver at the end of the last century, and the American dollar almost succeeded in domesticating gold, the last vestige of savage money. However, a new era of savage money is dawning in the twilight of the American empire. "Money" has an equivocation rather than a definition. It is a chameleon-like symbol which is forever changing as mercantile relations between people vary over time and place. This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.

C A Gregory's Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology. Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique of neoclassical economics and development theory, a critical history of colonial Papua New Guinea, and a comparative ethnography of exchange in Melanesian societies. This new edition includes a new foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern that discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered, debates that have only become more salient in our ever-more-neoliberal and ever-more-globalized era.