ESSAYS ON EUROPE, ISLAM, AND WORLD HISTORY

By Marshall G.S. Hodgson.

Edited, with an Introduction and Conclusion, by Edmund Burke III.

Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. 1993.

Pp. xxi, 328. Pbk: US$16.95.

Ignorance of history is a factor in the ease with which the colonizing powers are able to capture Third World bodies and minds. History as practiced in Euro-American academic circles has become a discipline of narrow specialties and sub-specialities, each focusing on its own areas and periods distinct from other areas and periods. Those who study history in Western academic environments are learning a particular methodology of history, usually without being given the benefit of alternative methodologies. While particularized micro-histories have their place, methodologies are needed that will also enable macro-histories.

The development of a holistic methodology for doing world history was the life pursuit of the late American historian Marshall Hodgson. He was critical of his colleagues who focused on narrow regional or period histories. While Hodgson is best known for his 3 volume work, The Venture of Islam, he also produced numerous essays on various historical and methodological topics. Many of his most important essays have been gathered together, along with some previously unavailable essays, in the posthumous collection Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History.

The book is divided into three parts: Europe in a Global Context, Islam in a Global Context, and The Discipline of World History. In Part One, Hodgson illustrates the relationship between ethnocentrism and worldview by looking at the development of maps. He shows how the Mercator projection places Northern Europe in front and center and distorts relative sizes to make Europe appear larger than it really is. He then links this to the European drive for a self-centered world dominance. While more accurate projections have since been developed, the prevailing projection used by the Western news media and many textbooks is still the Mercator.

The most useful chapter in Part One focuses on what Hodgson calls "The Great Western Transmutation." His thesis here is that a particular worldview, which he terms "technicalism", emerged in Europe during the 17th to 19th centuries. Hodgson shows that technicalism was the driving force behind European predatory political and economic systems, and stresses that in order to understand Muslim responses to the imposition of European systems, one needs to take a critical look at the development of those systems. From this analysis, it is easy to draw the conclusion that, in the context of a global world history, Europe is an aberration.

Hodgson's self-critical analysis of European history was a cause for his work to be considered "controversial." But taken in the larger context of a global history, as Hodgson does, it is clear that Europe was and remains an aberration (not to mention its offshoots and satellites, including the United States). Of course, those scholars who are still dedicated to Euro-American supremacy and dominance will disagree with Hodgson. Hodgson was one of the first Western scholars to emphasize an awareness of and openness toward the historian's perspectives, methodologies, and precommitments. While methodologies based on "subjectivities" and "situated knowledges" are now in vogue in some Western academic circles, when Hodgson was writing in the 1940s to 1960s, the illusion of "objectivity" prevailed unquestioned (in popular history, as portrayed by the news media and in secondary education, this sense of objectivity prevails to this day).

Hodgson problematizes the notion of scholarly objectivity in several of the essays throughout this work. In Part Two, Hodgson takes a refreshing view of Islamic history for a Western historian. In a chapter on "Cultural Patterning in Islamdom and the Occident", he makes a sincere effort to try and understand Islam and Christianity as frameworks for religious life. He concludes that in many ways the two are distinct and even mutually exclusive, but refrains from making one~sided value judgements. His core comparison is that Christianity demands "personal responsiveness to redemptive love in a corrupted world", while Islam demands "personal responsibility for the moral ordering of the natural world." Those engaged in interfaith dialogues will likely find these distinctions useful. Hodgson was himself a devout believer in a long persecuted sect of Christianity, the Quakers, and this may explain in part his sensitivity toward studying other religions. Hodgson draws useful political distinctions between what he calls Western "corporativism" and Islamic "contractualism." In the West, a sense of order is derived from "autonomous political offices" which "carry authority insofar as they fitted into mutual hierarchical relations within a fixedly structured total social body", while in the Islamic world, a sense of order is derived from "autonomous fixed units arranged in hierarchical mutual relations in a closed and fixedly structure whole." In his discussion of legal systems, Hodgson recognizes the centrality of the shari'ah in maintaining consistency across cultures and throughout history. He also makes comparisons between Western "corporative formalism" and Islamic "communal moralism."

In the chapter on "Modernity and the Islamic Heritage", Hodgson raises an interesting paradox. He notes the tendancy among orientalists to focus almost exclusively on either the first century of Islamic history or on the colonial period, leaving an abyss of over 1000 years of history with comparatively little study. The paradox is, as Hodgson notes, that 19th and early 20^th century Islamic reformers did exactly the same thing. While the motives may have been different, orientalists and reformers shared a common (and narrow) understanding of Islamic history. In this chapter, as well as in earlier chapters, Hodgson stresses that in order to derive maximum benefit from historical study, one needs to consider its entire sweep.

Part Three includes several essays on a specific methodology for doing world history. Hodgson discusses the problems of doing large-scale historical inquiry, the validity of discussing history in terms of regions and ages, and the possibilities for integrating the historical disciplines. This material will likely be useful for those engaged in teaching history. While Hodgson's stated goal was to understand world history holistically, he really only focuses on the North Eurasian cultural complex. He has little to say about sub-Saharan African or North and South Native North American cultures, and almost completely neglects trans-Atlantic history. Perhaps this is due in part to the general short shrift these areas received in the academic environment in which he worked. Or, perhaps he would have gotten to these parts of the world had he lived longer (Hodgson died in 1968 at the age of 46). Readers will also likely find his use of language a bit difficult. Hodgson coined a lot of words (such as "technicalism"), and also used arcane terms (like "Oikoumene" for the Eurasian cultural complex). Part of this may be his discomfort with the prevailing discourse on world history, but an equally important factor is that Hodgson used primarily European sources (there is little evidence that he made use of primary sources in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, for example).

Despite these shortcomings, this book is useful for anyone interested in the discipline of world history. As is to be expected of Western academia, which still largely supports the colonial status quo, many of Hodgson's recommendations have gone unheeded. This is likely because he often turned the rather substantial corpus of orientalist literature on its head, and his conclusions usually differed from those of the sources he utilized. This may explain why Hodgson is considered as somewhat of an anomolous, or even controverial figure by Western historians. However, for people who wish to operate outside of the conventions of Western academic discourse, ideas that are considered "anomolous" or "controversial" by the Euro-American academic establishment are usually worth a look. More importantly, those from the Third World who study history in the West (many of whom return home to teach) are getting an incomplete sense of Western historical methodologies if they are not studying works like those of Marshall Hodgson.