Abstract:
In almost four decades Jack Goody has published a score of books
seeking to explain the divergence of Africa from the Eurasian continent,
and latterly to refute historical claims of western superiority
to Asia. Since the millennium, he has sought to clarify his own
vision of modern capitalism at a time when western hegemony is
coming under pressure from globalization. Yet this achievement
has not received the recognition from anthropologists that it
deserves. This article, in reviewing six books published during the
last decade, makes a case for reassessing Goody’s project from the
mid-1970s until now. It singles out two books for special attention,
The Theft of History and his latest volume, Metals, Culture and
Capitalism. A consistent theme of his recent work is to juxtapose
his own account of the history of western capitalism with those of
Marx, Weber and other writers in the classical tradition of social
theory. Jack Goody remains to this day an anthropologist whose sensibility was formed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork. But he
knew that, if he aspired to throw light on the human predicament as
a whole, he would have to become a world historian too.
