Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson (April 11, 1922 – June 10, 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. Works Though he did not publish extensively during his lifetime, he has become arguably the most influential American historian of Islam due to his three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, which The University of Chicago Press, in collaboration with Reuben Smith and other colleagues, published after his death. The work is recognized as a masterpiece that radically reconfigured the academic study of Islam. Hodgson is also recognized for his work on world history, which was rediscovered and subsequently published under the editorship of Edmund Burke III. In The Venture of Islam, Hodgson positioned Islam as a spiritual endeavor with a profound moral vision—on par with other world religions. He also reimagined the terminology of Islamic history and religion, coining terms like Islamdom (playing off "Christendom"). Hodgson also resituated the geographical locus of Islam; he shifted attention away from an exclusive focus on Arab Islam that had characterized the Euro-American study of the religion to include the Persianate society (his coinage), which shaped Muslim thought and practice from the Middle Period onward. Hodgson's writings were a precursor to the modern world history approach. His initial motivation in writing a world history was his desire to place Islamic history in a wider context and his dissatisfaction with the prevailing Eurocentrism and Orientalism 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 twelfth century was close to an industrial revolution, a development that was derailed, perhaps, by the Mongol onslaught in the thirteenth 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. Regarding western exceptionalism, he argued that it began with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century rather than the Renaissance of the fourteenth century