Festive traditions, gift-exchange and long-distance trade: brief reflections around cultural innovations and some early paths to peace and economic prosperity

By Lorenzo Bona

The festive days surrounding the Christmas holiday may invite us to contemplate the enduring practice of exchanging gifts, prompting reflections on its profound significance.

For example, reflecting on this practice, it may perhaps be a common reflex to immediately connect the act of gift-giving with joyous occasions that symbolize the importance of family and friendships. Yet, beneath this common and useful way of considering things there may be an element that could deserve particular attention: the impact of early behavioral patterns associated with gift exchange on the evolution of humanity.

It seems that these patterns of behavior, initially fostering cohesion within close family and friends’ circles, have extended their influence far beyond close personal relationships, playing a crucial role in the initiation and expansion of trade.

Lines of research in the field of economic history suggest, for example, that as far back as the Bronze Age, groups of individuals in search of resources not available within the territories in which they were living started to adopt the practice of exchanging gifts in ways that could somehow appear strategically oriented. What had initially been a gesture within close-knit relationships evolved into a method for signaling peaceful intentions to neighboring groups and thus achieve a main objective: to obtain their permission to enter their territories in order to try to find desired resources.

Over time and slowly, the practice of exchanging gifts seems to have gradually stimulated the production of more sophisticated behavioral schemes and forms of organization, like those that can be connected to the possibility of transferring the ownership of objects from one person to another on the basis of exchange ratios associated with the relative scarcity of objects.

In essence, the evolution of gift exchange practices would have guided human societies to create progressively sophisticated organizational rules, like those mirrored in the operation of the price mechanism, the logic of market competition, and the phenomenon of long-distance trade.

These rules, in turn, would have helped human beings in discovering extraordinary possibilities: those that can allow a growing number of individuals to leverage on trade in order to increasingly expand the boundaries of peaceful coexistence and the frontiers of economic growth and prosperity.