Hey everybody, and welcome to the eighth week of our newest feature. As ever, we have a specific initial prompt aimed at stimulating responses and discussion. This week's is the following.
When is something a gift, when is it a tax, and when is it tribute?
These terms are all used fairly frequently by historians to refer to various relationships/exchanges throughout human history. But it is not necessarily easy to actually distinguish how and when these terms should be applied. So this is everybody's chance to grapple with the topic, and see whether or not decent headway can be made at actually reaching some common ground.
It's quite likely that not only will historians with different periods and places of interests differ in their conclusions, but also that you will find historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists all coming to (at least slightly) different conclusions as well. If this is the case, then you should probably be prepared to explain your thought process in a way whereby specialists with different backgrounds are able to understand your reasoning.
Here are the upcoming (and previous) questions, and next week's question is this: How do you draw up the limitations to your expertise?
What I think is important is not the items being exchanged or even the way they are moved, but the social relation being expressed. "The gift honors the giver" as an old saying goes, and so the way a gift exchange is structured says a lot about the relation between the two parties. If it is perfectly reciprocal, the relationship between the two is of equals, but differences in the gifts signal broader differences in status. Giving a gift unreciprocated is an expression of authority, as the receiver is then bound by ties of obligation.
Tribute, on the other hands, works in the opposite way, as the giver of tribute is expressing a lower status than the receiver. This gets interesting when the two work at the same time: in China's relationship with the barbarians, for example, or the relationship between Yap and the Caroline Islands, items coming in would often be branded as "tribute" while items flowing out would be branded as "gifts". The actual material relationship is equal, but in both cases the act of exchange changes the meaning.
With taxation, I am not sure there is a better way of thinking of it than as bureaucratized and explicitly gathered for pragmatic reasons rather than as expressions of social relations.
A gift is a single, payment from one party to another. This is usually a monetary donation from one nation to another to garner favor, or it could be a transfer of land (for example France giving all it's holdings west of the Mississippi to Spain following the French and Indian War).
A tax is any money the government collects from its Citizens and Residents. These can be in the form of a tax on the trading of goods (Sales Tax, Goverment gets a percentage of sale, common during colonial era), a tax on the income of Citizens and Residents (Income Tax), a tax on the monetary value of property a person owns (Porperty Tax; this can be based on simply how much land someone owns, the value of the land the person owns, or the land as well as any worldly possesions on the land), and other forms of collecting money from a governments own people.
A tribute is a regular payment from one party to another, usually from a "lesser" nation or party (vassal, client, protectorate, colony, etc.) to a "greater" nation or party. These are usually in the form of goods (vassals would often pay in grain or rice in some cultures) or money (percentage or fixed amount of the income of the "lesser" party).
A tribute can also be a regular payment to encourage another group to not attack.
I would say that tax, and tribute/gift are separate mainly due to sovereignty. A tax is levied on people and institutions who are members of the state and their possessions. Citizens, nobility, enterprise. A tax is paid by default and to not pay is to be making a conscious decision not to pay.
The other two are inter-state transactions and are delimited by coercion. Scotland sees a new king on the throne of England and sends some gold as a coronation present? That's a gift. The new king sends emissaries to Stirling and demands gold to help pay for wars in France? That would be tribute. However the king may see it as a tax because of the English claim of suzerainty over his Scottish counterpart.
Another factor I would say plays into it is a matter of legislation. If the Romans decide that all client states- although probably not part of "Rome" for my previous definition of tax- must pay a few denari towards the public purse then that may be a tax, while negotiating separate amounts for each client tribe/kingdom would probably be referred to as tribute.
In the same example we could also look at what the client states thought of the situation. Many British tribes thoroughly Romanised but remained discrete social/political units within Roman Britain. I would wager that they would see any tax/tributes levied as tax while a German tribe over the Rhine who paid the same to keep the local garrison from bothering them would see it as a tribute.
One final factor might also be the rate of return on the wealth paid. You pay a tribute to stop something negative happening but don't expect it to benefit you otherwise. The Germans pay the toll and get nothing tangible in return, maybe a promise of military assistance or something. The Britons pay and expect to see a return of some kind. Infrastructure, trade opportunities, military protection, representation in the governor's palace, peace and law. Protection money to the mob vs taxes paying for law enforcement.
Just a few thoughts on the subject to get the ball rolling.