A Study of History, Vol 2 : The Genesis of Civilizations

Arnold Toynbee writes: In the first volume of A Study of History, I start by searching for a unit of historical study that is relatively self-contained and is therefore more or less intelligible in isolation from the rest of history. I was led into this quest by finding myself dissatisfied with the present-day habit of studying history in terms of national states. These seemed, and still seem, to me to be fragments of something larger, and I found this larger and more satisfying unit of study in a civilization. The history of the United States, for instance, or the history of Britain, is, as I see it, a fragment of the history of Western Christendom or the Western Christian World, and I believe I can put my finger on a number of other societies, living or extinct, that are of the same species. Examples of other living civilizations besides the Western Civilization are the Islamic and the Civilization of Eastern Asia, centring on China. Examples of extinct civilizations are the Greco-Roman and the Ancient Egyptian. This practice of dealing in civilizations instead of nations is taken for granted by orientalists, ancient-historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The carving-up of a civilization into pieces labelled nations is, I believe, something peculiar to students of modern Western history, and, with them too, this present practice of theirs is only recent. Down to the beginning of the eighteenth century the classic works of Western historians took for their field the whole history of Western Christendom or even the whole history of the World from the creation to the Last Judgement.