The Theft of History

In his polemical work The Theft of History (2006), Cambridge anthropologist and comparative sociologist Jack Goody fiercely critiques the – in his view – pervasive Eurocentric biases of much historical writing. Goody castigates the often implicit idea that the history of Europe is unique and different from other parts of the world. In his view, phenomena such as capitalism, democracy, individualism, feudalism, and even romantic love – often put forward as uniquely ‘European’ developments – are not present only in European history, but can be found in some form in different societies all over the world. Even the idea of uniqueness is not unique to the European continent – ‘a hidden ethnocentric risk is to be eurocentric about ethnocentricity’ – as ethnocentrism is a part of all societies and partly a condition of the personal and social identity of their members.

A false ‘divergence’ between a ‘free Europe’ and a ‘despotic’ and unfree Orient was conceptualized in the age of antiquity. According to Goody, this Orientalist notion of difference was reinforced by the voyages of discovery and the return to classical antiquity in the Renaissance and nineteenth-century industrialization and imperialism. Peter Burke has, for instance, questioned the unique character of the European Renaissance, pointing out that in many parts of the world some sort of a return to a lost cultural golden age can be observed. According to Goody, if a divergence exists between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, both economically and intellectually, this could only have been a recent development that would prove to be temporary.

Goody also deconstructs the notion of continuous and coherent ‘European history’ starting from the ‘Greek genius’ and the classical world and essentially culminating in the contemporary Western World. According to Goody, contemporary Europe has very little in common with the ancient world. In his view, ‘antiquity’ was appropriated and ‘invented’ by Europeans. (Early) modern Europeans projected their own image on the classical world, remodelling ‘antiquity’ as their own ideal. Instead, ancient Greece had been part of a larger Mediterranean world, the ancient Greeks had more in common with Africa and the Middle East than with modern Europe.