World History, Modernity, and Islam: Lessons from Marshall G.S. Hodgson
For a while now, I have been interested in Islamic history in general, and its relation to modernity in particular. This curiosity has led me to some thought-provoking works and texts. In that regard, the work of Marshall G.S. Hodgson — a Chicago University world historian and Islamic studies professor who passed away more than half a century ago — stands out for its originality and depth. He was one of those rare scholars who combined thorough scholarly rigor with a strong, compassionate, and deeply moral worldview. His study of Islamic societies is both respectful in its approach and incredibly meticulous in its methodology. Therefore, there is much we can learn from his work about world history, modernity, Islamic societies, and the general discipline of history itself. For me, there are three key lessons that can be taken from his work — the dynamism of non-Western societies, the importance of studying Islamic history as world history, and the diverse effects of modernity.
The Oikoumene and Dynamic Pasts
Before he was an Islamic studies expert, Hodgson was a world-historian through and through. He strongly advocated for studying history from a global perspective. He uses the Greek term ‘Oikoumene’ to describe the known world. In this conception, Europe is but one of the many civilizational areas that form the core of human history. He was highly critical of the Mercator projections and its implied Eurocentric assumptions which exalted and recognized Western Europe at the expense of other societies that were crudely lumped together as the ‘East’ or the ‘Orient’. Through his work across a wide range of regions, Hodgson showed us how problematic and analytically contentious this Mercator worldview of history was.
The usual Eurocentric conception of the world places the West at the center and shows how at the onset of modernity, it was exclusively the West that was capable of such a humungous shift in human history. The rest of the societies had by that time entered into ‘decadence’ and were by all means, unchanged over the past few centuries. The histories of other societies are, in a sense, only relevant when they impinge on or interact with the West. This line of argument is so deeply rooted in historical studies that even today most Western scholars and non-Westerners accept some of its core assumptions. It is to Hodgson’s credit that so many decades ago he saw through its limitations. Instead, he argued, and demonstrated with evidence, two key counterpoints.
First, he argued that the core regions of the world for most of human history were not situated in Western Europe. They were located in what he calls the region of ‘Nile to Oxus’. In his view, the historical regions of China, India, Persia, and Arabia, along with Hellenic societies, formed the core of the world where Western Europe was merely a frontier. Nevertheless, he also concedes that the West eventually came to dominate the world through increased application of social power via a process of technicalization, an approach that led to calculative reason. He calls it the ‘Great Western Transmutation’. However, for the rest of human history, it was the Nile-to-Oxus historical complex that gradually took humanity forward.
Second, he showed how dynamic the other historical societies were. They weren’t static or ‘decadent’ as some scholars tend to see them. These societies were in a constant state of evolution. For example, Sung China had already attempted its own (ultimately unsuccessful) industrial revolution centuries before Europe. Similarly, the urbane civilization which formed the model for most of the world at the onset of modernity was very much the result of constant up-gradation and gradual progress that was embodied in the whole of Oikoumene. Relatedly, he argued, these societies were in constant engagement with each other, and inventions from one region led to eventual diffusion in another.
In short, Hodgson’s conception of history hints at a world that is constantly on the move and deeply connected. This is perhaps felt most keenly in his study of Islamic societies.
Islamic History as World History
Hodgson’s three-volume monograph, The Venture of Islam, is a one of its kind work. Summarizing it would be quite a challenge in itself. What we can learn from it though is rather simple. Unlike many of his contemporaries and even recent scholars, Hodgson’s approach was distinctly respectful of Islam not just as a worldview, but also as a civilizational force that left a deep impact on the world. His work shows that Islamic civilization is not merely a topic of interest because of its interaction with the West but on its own terms. It embodied one of the largest ever historical complexes that stretched from Maghrib in Africa to China and influenced societies as far widely as was possible in history. In many ways, the Islamic civilization preempted and paved the way for the global domination that the West was to undertake a few centuries later.
Hodgson’s history of Islam brings to us a civilization that is constantly in engagement with the world around it and adapting accordingly. For instance, contrary to the generally accepted notion, Hodgson showed that the golden age of Islam was not in the Caliphate period but after it. He then also traces nodes of development in what came to be known as the three great Gunpowder Empires — Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal. The Islamic culture, politics, and social life in Hodgson’s work is an ever-evolving set of phenomena that have left a remarkable imprint on human history as a whole.
Modernity as a Differentiated Experience
Considering that most of his research was carried out before the 1960s, it is surprising how well Hodgson anticipated and articulated some incredibly fresh ideas about modernity. He traced the evolution of the West in thorough detail before coming back to show what a unique experience it was and how it could never be emulated again. According to him, modernity could’ve happened anywhere in the world but the version we see in our current reality is fundamentally Western. And because Western modernity — with its scientism, nation-states, capitalism, and weaponry — was the first to arrive, it has come to dominate the world. Thus, the idea that other nations are ‘lagging behind’ and need to go through the same process is fraught with errors. Through this analysis, he leads us to some of the root causes of an identity crisis that has held the Islamic world hostage in the current times.
The rest of the world has, unwittingly, been a participant in the West-led modernity and has therefore found it hard to define its own progression, the old pattern of gradual change that historical societies had otherwise gone through. In this, he preempted the works of scholars like Samir Amin who argued that the world-system was built on a core-periphery model and expecting peripheries to undergo a similar progression as the Core — the West in this regard — is an ahistorical approach.
Conclusion
Hodgson was a fundamentally moral individual. He fully recognized his own limitations as a scholar as well as the biases that his precommitments led to. Nevertheless, he was a highly methodical thinker and historian who, in the end, believed that there is no such thing as a neatly delineated Western or Eastern history. There is but one World History and it connects all of us together across time and space. To that end, his work provides lessons that are relevant and meaningful even today.
