This is a characteristically provocative and engaging essay from one of the world’s most distinguished social scientists. Jack Goody argues that Occidentalist views of our past have continued to dominate, to an unhealthy degree, and that the west has managed to steal credit for the invention of major conceptual categories like democracy, capitalism and individualism, and also to impose its own conceptual categories (especially those of time) onto the rest of the world.`The Theft of History’ will be read by an unusually wide audience of historians, anthropologists and social theorists.