“China has a more promising chance of shepherding mankind into political unity than any other country,” wrote Britain’s most famous historian in 1974. Arnold Toynbee, historian and prognosticator, was once famous enough to appear on the cover of Time magazine in 1947, but he is almost unheard of in the West today. Yet his legacy lives on in Asia, where Zhang Guangzhi of Fudan University’s history department can recall Toynbee rising from obscurity to acclaim as the greatest modern historian. Today, Zhang is one of dozens of scholars working to translate the entirety of Toynbee’s 3-million-word magnum opus, A Study of History, into Chinese.
Toynbee, born in 1889, came of age as World War I transformed the philosophy of history. Pessimism came to dominate a field once marked by attempts, like those of Hegel and Marx, to track mankind’s ascent from barbarism towards liberation. The German polymath Oswald Spengler offered the first volley with his two-volume Decline of the West, first published in 1918. For Spengler, civilizations resemble organisms; they are born, they live, they die.
Before Spengler’s work was translated into English, it was reviewed for the Times of London by Toynbee, fluent in German. A classicist by training, Toynbee grew to question Western historical narratives during his time as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference and a correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish War. In both cases, he felt the British public misunderstood the legitimate grievances of the colonized. By age 33, Toynbee was director of studies at Chatham House, Britain’s premier international relations institute, where he stayed for three decades.
Years later, Toynbee remembered that he “wondered at first whether my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler.” Spengler’s account of cycles of advanced cultures categorically rejected any notion of Eurocentrism. He elevated civilizations from Mesoamerica to China, ridiculed by 19th century imperialist historiography, to the same level as anything Europe had produced. But Toynbee soon realized that his project was distinct. Spengler’s differentiation of civilizations was so radical that he jousted at windmills to separate every fragment from culture to culture, even arguing that mathematics was a relative construct.
Toynbee’s alternative came with his A Study of History, published in 12 hefty volumes between 1934 and 1961. The 7,000-page work made Toynbee a household name, particularly after an abridgement sold at least 300,000 copies. While the idea of transnational civilizations remained at its core, it featured more sociology than Spengler’s quasi-mysticism. In place of iron laws of historical decline, Toynbee attempted to find trends between 21 civilizations across millennia.
Chief among his many arguments was the idea that civilizations develop in response to challenges. A people might face challenges above their limited resources, as in the Arctic, or too few challenges to spur the need for complex development, as he saw in equatorial highlands. The most successful cultures sprang from settings like China’s Yellow River Valley, where growing crops and maintaining communities required social organization to respond to flooding and invasion.
A worker digs lotus roots at a farm located in the wetlands of the Yellow River in Henan Province, China, on Oct. 3, 2006.China Photos/via Getty Images
He rejected the idea that society was some sort of supernatural phenomenon or pseudo-biological organism. Instead, he claimed that societies were merely the collection of relationships propelled by creative minorities, who lead the collective response to challenges. One colleague called his work a “Copernican revolution” that did more than any other 20th century thinker to drag historiography away from Eurocentrism.
Where Spengler rejected morality as just another social construct, Toynbee saw social morality, embodied in traditions like Confucianism or Christianity, as the glue that kept societies together. Despite personal agnosticism, he regretted the decline of European Christianity even while praising East Asia’s Confucianism and Buddhism as better alternatives. A civilization that had once innovated in response to past challenges, such as China, could become ossified and fall in the face of a new challenge, as Toynbee saw in the Mongol conquest of the Song Dynasty. From there, it could develop anew and rise again, or evolve into an “affiliated” civilization, as the Yellow River settlements had evolved into modern China.
Spengler had offered The Decline of the West, but Toynbee was more interested in the rise of the rest. If his story was more hopeful, Toynbee nonetheless saw the West on the path to social atomization and bureaucratic rigidity. Many in U.S. and European publics came to resent his predictions for the developing world’s rise at their expense. “Professor Toynbee Surrenders the West,” Commentary magazine accused in 1953.
By the end of the 1950s, Toynbee’s reputation was waning. His lack of empiricism and claim to assess trends from all of human history were suspect among a new generation of historians trained in specialization and rigorousness. One reviewer summed it up in 1955 when, speaking of the last four volumes of A Study of History, he castigated Toynbee’s “pretence of an empirical investigation” as “patently absurd.” A year later, Toynbee embarked on his longest trip to Japan, where he was given a hero’s welcome by Japan’s major newspapers. It was a sign of things to come.
Toynbee’s understanding of East Asia was originally an Achilles heel. He had nearly classified Japan within Chinese civilization. Before the Meiji Restoration, any Japanese intellectual would have done the same, but such a choice would have made him anathema among modern Japanese readers. Later, Toynbee responded to the objections of Korean readers by revising A Study of History to move Korea out of Japanese civilization to be a standalone.
Nonetheless, his work had been rapidly translated into Japanese, beginning with an abridgement of the first six volumes of A Study of History in 1949 and soon including his smaller works, with Civilization on Trial in 1952 and The World and the West in 1953. By 1959, Japanese historians were producing commentaries on Toynbee.
A street in Shanghai circa 1930.ClassicStock/via Getty Images
As Toynbee’s reputation declined in the West, it rose throughout East Asia, beginning with post-war Japanese intellectuals enticed by the view that once-preeminent civilizations could rise again by rebuilding social mores.
Daisaku Ikeda, leader of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai, recruited Toynbee for a 40-hour dialogue that was compiled as a mass-market bestseller. Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita launched a Toynbee Society in 1968.
The eventual complete Japanese translation of A Study of History ran 25 volumes with commentary, and his writing was commonplace in business circles. Though his popularity faded in Japan, Toynbee’s predictions for East Asia offered reassurance for a region emerging from the wreckage of war. Decades earlier, he had defended U.S. ingenuity when most European observers dismissed the New World as a cultural backwater, only to later see the United States as a nation at risk of losing its hope to build a better world. As he had championed U.S. potential at the beginning of his career, Toynbee chose to champion Asia in his twilight.
Although Japanese academics were the first to embrace Toynbee, he regarded Japan, alongside the Soviet Union, as having “Westernized themselves so successfully they have caught the West’s congenital sickness,” threatening social unity. This and Toynbee’s preoccupation with historical experience led him to finally declare in a 1974 article for Horizon entitled “Inheritors of the Earth?” his confidence in a China-led future. Soon, China was listening.
Toynbee predicted that a dominant China would usurp the United States and the Soviet Union regardless of the outcome of the Cold War. This optimism held at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when Toynbee argued that China’s population is “very hard-working, extremely intelligent, and they have decided if they are to count in the world they’ve got to go modern and learn about Western technology, which they certainly will be able to do.”
As China’s rivalry with the West grows more fiery than post-war Japan’s ever was, the very Occidental pessimism that made Toynbee so unpopular in the United States has kept him alive in China. Toynbee has continued to be conjured within state media. The Toynbee-Ikeda Dialogue, where Toynbee wonders if China could sinicize the global order as it once sinicized Manchu and Mongol conquerors, continues to sell in Chinese translation.
His reception in China had begun heartily. He visited China to explore a civilization he knew little about, resulting in his 1931 travelogue, A Journey to China. There, liberal academic Hu Shih had influenced Toynbee to generalize the concept of a “renaissance” beyond Europe to China. Later, the Warring States school imported Spengler and Toynbee as foundational jumping off points. Its premier thinker, Lei Haizong, theorized the world wars as a “warring states” period in global history akin to the periods of division in Chinese history. As China had supposedly consistently unified, these theorists predicted a similar global turn to unipolarity.
The Warring States school came to an abrupt halt with the foundation of the People’s Republic, where Marxist scholars initially dismissed Toynbee as a “reactionary bourgeois historian.” The standard English abridgement was released in Chinese translation by the Shanghai People’s Press in 1959, but publishing ceased during the Cultural Revolution. Today, however, the abridgement has been consistently in print since a 31,000-copy run in 1986. Toynbee’s collection Civilization on Trial was translated in 1988. Since then, Toynbee has been cited in Chinese papers alongside such names as Samuel Huntington and Xi Jinping.
By now, Xi is enthusiastic in describing China as a civilization, harkening to Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations with China’s Global Civilization initiative. Fudan University’s Zhang Weiwei, a vocal Toynbee admirer, has attempted to pitch China’s Politburo the notion of China as a civilizational state. China’s Confucius Institutes attempt to be what Toynbee saw as the “universal churches” that carry on the philosophy of civilization-uniting empires, such as Han China, beyond their decline.
An emphasis on civilizations stretching across national borders and extending across multiple historical states thus allows Chinese policymakers to argue for Tianxia, a model for multipolarity, blending international relations theory and Confucian virtue ethics. This centers the claims of culturally hegemonic states within civilizational spheres, such as China itself vis-à-vis Taiwan or non-Han ethnic groups within the Sinosphere.
A turn towards civilizational nationalism is well-rooted in history. Chinese dynasties had to justify themselves as inheritors to the orders they overthrew. Even supposedly barbarian Mongol Yuan or Manchu Qing rulers emphatically insisted on their inheritance to the same civilization that produced Confucius. China’s claims upon disputed territory today depend on its role as inheritor to the Qing Dynasty, even as the state’s own legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver the promised new China, reconciling this legacy with Marxism.
In a series of conversations near the end of his life published as Toynbee on Toynbee, he predicted that Beijing could successfully balance the different bureaucratic tendencies within Marxism and Confucianism. In a note added to a 1972 re-abridgement of A Study of History, Toynbee chastised Western observers who entirely dismissed China’s ability to bridge the gap between Marxism, which he regarded as a heresy of the West, and its own Confucian tradition. “China may exercise conscious discrimination in tempering the stability of her own conservative traditional culture with the West’s more flexible but more volatile dynamism,” a correction from the Mao era. If so, “the result … might be a wholly new cultural departure for civilized Man.” Such a strategy, reviving the “Marxist classics” hand-in-hand with the Confucian, is perhaps the largest philosophical initiative of the Xi era.
An elderly Chinese farmer near her home, with a new housing development in the background, just outside of Beijing on Nov. 21, 2014.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
From there, Toynbee predicted China might “inherit the Third World” by becoming its primary model for development. Chinese public diplomacy across the developing world, particularly in Africa, has followed suit. Toynbee saw many civilizations as having fallen victim to what he, in an odd turn of phrase, called their “external proletariat,” an umbrella term for “others” exploited by empires that he derived from the relationship of German barbarians to Rome.
In the case of the modern West, the historian saw an exported China model as a rallying point that could turn the developing world into an external proletariat, sparking conflict to upend Western world dominance. Whether or not it reflects reality, the claim among senior leadership that “China will always be a developing country” amounts to advocacy for that concept.
“I have a foreboding,” Toynbee said in a 1962 lecture, “that our 20th century Western world may be required to pay reparations at compound interest for the sins against China that the 19th century Western world committed.” The old Western economic world order was embodied by engineers who built “railways in Argentina and China and Turkey.” Similar tracks are built today but the global system they uphold, like Toynbee’s life work, is becoming Beijing’s.
