A Study of History, Vol 10

Title: A Study of History, Vol 10 – The Inspirations of Historians

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1954)

ISBN: 978-0-19-215218-3

Pages: 442

This is my 300^th book review in this blog and how to do it better than having a work of Toynbee to celebrate it with? This volume is in effect the epilogue of the other nine volumes that went before it. The central theme of the series ends in the first nine volumes, and this one is to acknowledge the author’s debt to persons, books and works of art that helped him in preparing the text. There is also an autobiographical section on the inspirations that move historians to produce masterpieces of research. Readers would be left wondering at the varied sources of inspiration the author identified and assimilated to his heart’s content. Inspiration is not something that can be gulped in by anybody who happens to come along the way. It requires talent to identify whether what is offered to him is worthy of further investigation and pick up which one to discard. It also exposes the effects of changes in school curriculum effected in the first quarter of the previous century in England, which did away with Greek and Latin in favour of subjects which are more relevant to the pupil in his career oriented along the lines of science. Toynbee does not criticize the new approach as such, but thanks his good fortune for having had the opportunity to have an education that sprouted from the springs of classics. This deep knowledge of the ancient texts in their native tongues helped such scholars to live in two worlds simultaneously. Whenever such learned men experienced an event in the social or political life of the society of the present, they could immediately think of a similar incident in the lives of the Greek or Roman communities which had grabbed much of their attention in their academic lives. The ‘Acknowledgements’ section of the book stands out as a grand effort to express the author’s gratitude to the persons and books that made him what he was. The notion of expressing indebtedness is itself borrowed from the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the very first book to which Toynbee expresses thanks is Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, though he has wrung Gibbon much in his references to the author in this, as well as other, volumes of the series. This book also includes a comprehensive index to volumes 7 to 10, which envelops a large fraction of the total number of pages.

Inspiration for pursuing history takes root in childhood. The inclination to history comes about in varied ways. If the child happens to live in a town full of historic monuments, or associated with episodes of history, it will be primed for a career in it. Or the inclination may come through religious literature, in which history stands frozen across time. But there is no hard and fast rule on this, as the interest may be kindled prosaically through reading of books, as in Toynbee’s case, which is also augmented by the fact that his mother was herself much learned and a historian too. The author considers his education in Greek and Latin to be a great blessing, as it moved way soon after to the modern syllabus where the topics taught at schools and universities concerned with mundane affairs. He assigns three reasons for setting out on a thorough reading of history and finding the operation of laws in the passage of historical events. The first is his background in the classical languages, then the exposure made available to western scholars, of the varied civilizations on the face of the planet as a result of global exploration by western mariners, and lastly, his own encounter with the First World War. Great wars, and the ruin and desolation it garners in its wake, make profound impact on historians. It germinates in them the idea of seeking the answer to a paramount question, “how the present state of things came about?” Scholars compare the present state of affairs to a corresponding period in the lives of other civilizations. In short, Toynbee tells the story of how he became the historian of the post-Modern world.

This book contains many autobiographical sketches. The most notable is the author’s ambition to become the historian of the universal state of Western Christendom, to which civilization he too belongs, and whose universal state phase has not been materialized yet on its way to disintegration. Early historians of the same genre include Josephus who wrote about the Roman empire when it conquered Palestine, Clarendon during the English civil war, Thucydides of the Peloponnesian Wars and Rhodes of the American civil war. He has taken Polybius as the model for him in this outcome aspired for. Polybius lived during the Punic Wars, and recorded the struggle between two titans that ended up with the wiping out of Carthage and enthronement of Rome as the sole ecumenical power. He was a prisoner of war, who later commanded respect from his captors. Alluding to this episode, and hinting at his own passion to become the West’s historian, he says, “It might be guessed however, that, if Rome’s role were to be played in a post-Modern western world by the United States, the historian of her involuntary assumption of dominion would be a West European, and it could be prophesied with greater confidence that, if the latter day West European Polybius did leave his native land to do this piece of creative intellectual work, he would visit the United States neither as a prisoner-of-war nor as a political hostage but as the hospitably invited guest of some politically disinterested non-governmental American institution dedicated single-mindedly to the promotion of knowledge” (p.66). When we remember that Toynbee worked exactly in such a position at Princeton, readers get a glance of his well-deserved ambition.

The book sports a long appendix on the accepted chronology for dating the reign of the First Dynasty of Babylon. There are four rival propositions for setting the time period of the dynasty that is more widely known for the name of a great ruler, Hammu Rabi, who belonged to this group. This explains the pitfalls in adopting a contender at the expense of others. Corroboration for the precepts of a chronology may have to be sought in the histories of other civilizations. In the present case, the clue needed to be looked for in the travails of the adjacent Egyptian civilization. Then comes the invasion of Hyksos, a barbarian war band from central Asia that ran over the west Asian societies. While there is no accord among historians regarding the composition of Hyksos in racial terms, Toynbee suggests a startling proposition that has tremendous potential to attract the attention of Indian historians, if proved right. According to the author’s theory, the Hyksos consisted of Sanskrit speaking barbarians who erupted out of central Asian pasture lands. When they reached Eastern Iran, they separated into two streams, one which turned left and descended on the Indus valley, while the other turned right and moved straight across to Egypt. Even though Toynbee does not propose it in verbatim, this date of the bifurcation of the nomad horde and its overflow to the Indus region is around the 18^th century BCE, which has great appeal to another theory that the native Indus culture succumbed to Aryan assault at this time. Everything is perfectly matched and scholars may find this arena ripe for further investigation and harvesting of fruitful results. However, the appendix is painfully long and technical for the taste of the general reader. The intricacies of fixing the prons and cons of rival chronologies is very tedious and such elaborate nitpicking is unwarranted for common readers. What other thing can we expect from the discussion of a topic in which even Toynbee describes himself as a layman?

The author’s proclivity to be a Christian moralist shines through in more than one passage. He defines history as a vision of God revealing himself in action to souls that were sincerely seeking him and then, the historian’s path is said to be ascending from a feeling for the poetry in History through a sense of awe at God’s action in History to a participation in Man’s fellowship with Man which brings him to the threshold of the saint’s communion with God (p.129)! Even though Gibbon is acknowledged in glowing terms, one barb is still reserved for him for harbouring “a narrowness of his sympathies with the human objects of his studies”. Toynbee seems bent on unseating Gibbon from the throne in which literature has placed him.

An excellent advice is given to prospective writers in turning a deaf ear to critics, as “An author had better retire from business if he has not the humility to conceive of the possibility that, after all, he may be mistaken, and if he has not also the common sense to see, in the living authorities on his subject, not critics to be combated after publication, but mentors to be consulted before it, at a stage when it is still not too late to profit by their fruitfully chastening strictures” (p.229).

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star