A Study of History by Arnold Joseph Toynbee

The book was widely reviewed by the British press, the Daily Mirror comparing it to Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace Many readers were familiar with Toynbee’s Guardian reports of the 1921 Yalova Peninsula Massacres. Rather than being the riddle an irresponsible “Orient” set the sharpest diplomatic minds of occidental Powers, the “Eastern Question” became The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, the title of Toynbee’s 1922 study of “the shadow upon the rest of humanity cast by Western civilization.” The book argued that western ideas of “nationality” (“a question of sentiment, not of language or race” for Toynbee) had misled eastern “civilizations” to sell their birthright for a mess, not of pottage, but of genocide and proxy wars. Whereas Freeman’s brief trip to Herzegovina in 1875 simply confirmed him in his views of “the terrible Turk”, Toynbee’s repeated journeys to Istanbul, Smyrna and other parts of Anatolia between 19 transformed his perspective. The pair also shaped Anglophone public opinion on the “Eastern Question”: Freeman during the “Bulgarian Horrors” and in books such as The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877), Toynbee with the 1917 “Blue Book” on the Armenian Genocide. Where Freeman wrote microhistories of race, however, Toynbee’s macrohistory was one of “civilizations”. While still at Winchester Toynbee decided his life’s mission was to follow in Herodotus’ footsteps, as a second “great gigantic historian.” įreeman and Toynbee were fascinated by the patterns of history, understood as a series of analogies across vast gulfs of time and space. And both were precocious swots who became fluent in ancient Greek at a disturbingly young age. Both wrote at considerable length in a stylized manner which lends itself to parody. Both Freeman and Toynbee were fascinated by the patterns of history, understood as a series of analogies across vast gulfs of time and space.

I was reminded of how little I had paid for a shelf of equally heavy tomes by an earlier British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892). Somervell one-volume abridgement (1946) on Abe.Ī Study goes cheap. It was only when I read a 2014 essay by the sociologist Krishan Kumar that I decided to order the early volumes of the Study and (full disclosure!) the D. Toynbee not through his massive A Study of History (1934-54), but via his critics: Hugh Trevor-Roper and particularly Elie Kedourie’s Chatham House Version (1970), which introduced Toynbee as the dean of a school of moralistic flagellants who presented Britain and the West as “aggressors and everyone else as victims”. Like many of my generation, I first encountered Arnold J.

A Study of History by Arnold Joseph Toynbee