When talking and thinking historically about research in social work we are inevitably influenced by our presuppositions regarding social work and its history more generally. ‘Everyone knows who is traditionally said to have invented paper’ – so might someone say in China. But almost no-one in Europe or the Americas knows who invented paper. By extension, what we ‘know’ to be the most important moments in the history of social work will vary depending on whether we ask someone in Japan, Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Brazil, Egypt, Denmark, Taiwan, Italy, Australia, the UK or the US. Similar consequences would follow if we were to ask social workers from different countries what they think we should most regret or even apologise for in our histories, or if we were to ask as to the greatest characters in social work history. Indeed, what counts as social work and when it started will tell us something of what sort of stories people come to accept. A national story of social work may be one of survival against political odds, or against the dominance of the ‘big’ nation next door, or as one's own nation exercising imperial power. In this sense, all stories of the past are really stories of the present.