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Research in a global context: a discussion of Toynbee's legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Christopher Brewin
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Extract

Arnold Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House from 1924 until his retirement in 1954. His fame rests on two monumental projects to establish a global perspective. The Annual Survey each year reviewed the world as a geographical whole, selecting four or five themes for special treatment. It was not an edited volume. The Study of History put Western civilization in the context of a historical survey of all previous civilizations. Quite apart from his considerable journalistic output, the thirty-four volumes of the Survey and the ten volumes of the Study show how seriously Toynbee had taken a schoolmaster's injunction ‘first to see your subject or your problem as a whole’. Toynbee believed that a global perspective in terms of both time and space was of practical use.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 115 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1992

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References

1 Toynbee, A. J., Experiences (1969), pp. 91–2Google Scholar.

2 Public Record Office, War Cabinet Papers, CAB 21/1582.

3 See Geyl, P., Debates with Historians (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Trevor-Roper's attack can be found in a useful collection in Montague, F. M. Ashley (ed.), Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (Boston, 1956)Google Scholar. See also Dray's, William H.‘Toynbee's search for historical laws’ in History and Theory, 1, no. 1 (1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It should also be said that one reason for rejecting Toynbee's legacy may be that very little of his output is suitable for student use. He did not interpret his duties as a professor as requiring him to teach. Volume VIII of the Study of History has the merit of dealing with the Modern West and Russia, Orthodox Christendom, the Hindu World, Islam, the Jews, Far Eastern and indigenous American civilizations. His defence of Turkey against the liberal assumption that Balkan nations were being oppressed by their presence is all the more poignant because it redresses the balance of the propaganda Toynbee wrote in the Great War. The Survey itself is now too dated, and too dismissive of economics, to be useful as teaching material for international relations students. Perhaps his most readable books are the travel books, named after permanent geographical features like Between Oxus and Jumna: A Journey in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and his autobiographical books, Experiences and Acquaintances which, like R. G. Collingwood's Autobiography are short justifications of his intellectual approach rather than accounts of his life. I have not read his 1970 volume, Cities on the Move, in which he recounts his reception of the work on Third-World city planning by the Greek architect, Constantine Doxiadis. Toynbee was also a journalist, collecting his pieces in works such as Civilisation on Trial. But there is nothing which can be set for student use comparable to E. H. Carr's volumes on Russian history or the Twenty Years’ Crisis, with its attack on Toynbee for identifying morality with British interests.

4 McNeill, W. H., Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York and Oxford, 1989), p. 319Google Scholar endnote 5.

5 Sir Anthony Eden, 1 April 1943.

6 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 200.

7 Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History (Oxford, 1934), III, p. 212Google Scholar.

8 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace (London, 1942), p. 108Google Scholar, and The Future of Nations, Independence or Interdependence (London, 1941), p. 100Google Scholar.

9 10 Jan. 1918, ‘Memorandum on the formula of ”the Self-determination of Peoples” and the Moslem World’.

10 Toynbee, A. J., A Study of History (Oxford, 1954), VIII, pp. 724-5Google Scholar; and sections on Islam and Hindus.

11 Toynbee, A. J., Nationality and the War (London, 1915), p. 494Google Scholar.

12 Toynbee, A Study of History, V, pp. 160–1.

13 Toynbee, A Study of History, I, p. 211.

14 Toynbee, A. J., Civilisation on Trial (Oxford, 1948), pp. 235-6Google Scholar.

15 Toynbee, A Study of History, VIII, p. 148.

16 This ambiguity can be traced in the prewar volumes. One of the oddities of the Study is that Toynbee did not make much use of China. For China is the best exemplar of his preferred pattern of the stages of civilization being the work of a creative minority, and then put at risk by breakdown, requiring rule t o be imposed by a dominant minority, on a three-century cycle. Thus, th e warring states period (a Chinese expression) is followed by the Han, breakdown, the revived Han, breakdown, the Tang, revolt, rally until 900, further mess to the Sung in 960, the invasion of barbarians an d the retreat south of the Yangtse, with this pattern of three centuries with a break in the middle being successively replicated to the present century. It may therefore be that Toynbee did not stress the Chinese example because it never led to a higher religion through an alienated proletariat, or rather that the Tao was not sufficiently universal.

17 Toynbee, Arnold J., Experiences (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

18 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 199.

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20 Toynbee, Experiences.

21 Toynbee, A. J., The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (Oxford, 1922), p. 29Google Scholar.

22 Toynbee, A Study of History, VIII, p. 145. He goes on to suggest thai: this would be an opportunity to end the ‘provocative inequality’ between the primitive peasantry of Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Indo-China, Indonesia, India, South-West Asia, Egypt, tropical Africa and Latin America, and the urban industrial ‘working class’ & who were all living ‘on a level shockingly below the contemporary level of the North American and West European bourgeoisie’.

23 Toynbee, Experiences.

24 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 180.

25 FRPS Annual Report, 3 Nov. 1942, p. 9.

26 CAB117/184 Note by Baxter to Sir George Chrystal of 21 Feb. 1942.

27 McNeitt, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 183.

28 CAB 21/1582 WM (40) 233rd conclusion Minute 6 of 23 Aug. 1940. Toynbee is recorded as present at the second meeting on 30 October, 1940.

29 CAB 117/78, ‘Political Forces and Prospects in France’, 26 April 1941.

30 Brewin, C., ‘British Plans for International Operating Agencies for Civil Aviation, 1941–45’, The International History Review, 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1982), pp. 90–110Google Scholar.

31 Public Record Office, CAB117/79, ‘Processes of Political Integration’, April 1941.

32 Public Record Office CAB 117/79. J. L. Brierley, ‘The Role of Law in International Reconstruction’.

33 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace (London, 1942) p. 108Google Scholar and The Future of Nations, Independence or Interdependence, p. 100.

34 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, pp. 184, 212–17.

35 Toynbee, A. J., Acquaintances (London, 1967), pp. 283-5Google Scholar.

36 Toynbee, Experiences, the third of his Greek educations.

37 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 170.

38 Toynbee, Prospects of Western Civilisation, p. 48.

39 CAB 117/79, 17.

40 His wife was not above savaging him for avoiding military service in the First War and avoiding London in the Second War. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 190.

41 CAB 117/79, British-American World Order, 8 July 1941, esp. paras 21 and 31.

42 CAB 117/79, Prolegomena to Peace aims, 5 April 1941.

43 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace (London, 1942), p. 273Google Scholar; also Nationalism and After (London, 1945)Google Scholar, ch2.

44 Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London, 1939), p. 101Google Scholar.

45 Moran, Lord, Churchill (Boston, 1966)Google Scholar.

46 McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, p. 208.