The Invention of World Religions
The 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago helped fix a popular list of the world's 'great religions'. Tomoko Masuzawa's 2005 study showed that the taxonomy itself took shape in nineteenth-century European scholarship rather than within the traditions it describes.
The World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago (September 1893); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (2005)
The now-standard list of 'world religions' — Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the rest — treated as though it were a set of ancient native categories.