A Study of History - Criticism

Criticism

The social scientist Ashley Montagu assembled 29 other historians' articles to form a symposium on Toynbee's A Study of History, published as Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (1956 Cloth ed.). Boston: Extending Horizons Books, Porter Sargent Publishers. ISBN 0-87558-026-2. The book includes three of Toynbee's own essays: What I am Trying to Do (originally published in International Affairs vol. 31, 1955; What the Book is For: How the Book Took Shape (a pamphlet written upon completion of the final volumes of A Study of History) and a comment written in response to the articles by Edward Fiess and Pieter Geyl (originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 16, 1955.)

Arnold Toynbee suggests that the civilisation as a whole is the proper unit for the study of history, not the nation state, which he suggests is just a part of a larger whole. He suggests a list of 21 civilisations, and an additional 5 "arrested civilisations", but when one examines this list it seems to be very arbitrary at times where one civilisation ends and a new one starts. For example, do we identify a "Sumerian" civilisation in ancient Iraq, followed by a later "Akkadian, or Babylonian" civilisation, or are these just different phases of a single, long-lived Mesopotamian civilisation? Toynbee lists them as separate, but later includes both the Greek and the Roman civilisations within a single category, called "Hellenic," though it is clear from Toynbee's list that Greek gave rise to Roman just as Sumer gave rise to Babylonia. Why is Sparta listed as a separate civilisation from the rest of the Hellenic world? What is the relation between Minoan and Mycenaean (which Toynbee considers early Hellenic)? Jacquetta Hawkes considers these two aspects of the same civilisation (which she calls Mino-Mycenaean, a finding that would be supported by Leonard Palmer from his studies of Linear B). If these are just early phases of a much larger civilisation, separated from Hellenic civilisation by a "Dark Age", what is one to do with what Toynbee calls "Sinic civilisation", separated from "Far Eastern Civilisation", or for that matter "Indic civilisation" separated from "Hindu civilisation"? And in his list there is no mention of such civilisations as the Etruscans, the Ethiopians, the East Africans, or the Sudanese. (While the latter could perhaps be considered part of the Islamic civilisation, the former could not.) And what of Tibet and South East Asia (old Indo-China), are they part of the Indian Hindu Civilisation even though they are Buddhist, or part of Far Eastern Civilisation, or both. And if Hittite is a separate civilisation, where do Hurrians, Elamites and Urartu fit?

David Wilkinson suggests that there is an even larger unit than civilisation. Using the ideas drawn from "World Systems Theory" he suggests that since at least 1500 BC that there was a connection established between a number of formerly separate civilisations to form a single interacting "Central Civilisation", which expanded to include formerly separate civilisations such as India, the Far East, and eventually Western Europe and the Americas into a single "World System". In some ways, it resembles what William H. McNeill calls "the closure of the oecumene", in his book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community.

And then concerning the fall of civilisations, Toynbee suggests a single schema, drawn in part from his experience as a classical scholar, based upon the creativity of classical Athens, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. This pattern he finds has parallels with Sima Qian's views of the "Mandate of Heaven" or the Dynastic cycle (Asabiyyah) suggested by Ibn Khaldun, for Far Eastern and Islamic civilisations respectively. But the pattern is not universally observed, and a number of civilisations become incorporated into others. These, he suggests are the so-called Aborted civilisations.