Marshall Hodgson

Hodgson was the author of the three-volume ''The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization''. Through this work, and as an Orientalist, 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 which 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 Rennaisance in the 14th Century to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century . His explanations for the divergence (through his concept of 'transmutation') are rather less important than the overall approach to world history which he espoused.

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Marshall Hodgson