Marshall Hodgson
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Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson (1922 - 1968), was an Islamic Studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. He was also a practicing Quaker (important to note, since his religious outlook informed his views on world history).
Hodgson was the author of the three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Through this work, and his overall scholarship on Islam, he was renowned in his day. However, his modern importance rests with his work on world history, which remained relatively unnoticed during his lifetime. Much of it was rediscovered and subsequently published through the efforts of Edmund Burke III of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Hodgson's writings were a precursor to the modern world history approach. His initial motivation in writing world history was his desire to place Islamic history in a wider context and his dissatisfaction with the prevailing Eurocentrism of his day. Hodgson painted a global picture of world history, in which the 'Rise of Europe' was the end-product of millennia-long evolutionary developments in Eurasian society; modernity could conceivably have originated somewhere else. Indeed, he accepted that China in the 12th century was close to an industrial revolution, a development that was derailed, perhaps, by the Mongol onslaught in the 13th century:
- "Occidental development had come ultimately from China, as did apparently, the idea of a civil service examination system, introduced in the eighteenth century. In such ways the Occident seems to have been the unconscious heir of the abortive industrial revolution of Sung China" Marshall G. S. Hodgson Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (Cambridge 1993), p.68.
Hodgson denied original western exceptionalism and moved the divergence of Europe forward -- from the Renaissance in the 14th century to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. His explanations for the divergence are rooted in the idea of a 'great Western Transmutation.' This is not to be confused with the Industrial Revolution as it includes variables more diverse than just industry. Hodgson posited that all the societal elements (industry, banking, health care, police, etc.) of Western European nations became so advanced (or 'technicalized') and co-dependent, that those societies were able determine their own rate of progress.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Marshall G. S. Hodgson (Edited, with an Introduction and Conclusion, by Edmund Burke III) Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (Cambridge 1993)
