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In 1912, he became a fellow and tutor at Balliol College, a position he held for three years.

In the same year, Toynbee pursued his interest in ancient Greek history by studying at the British Archeological School in Athens. Showing academic promise at a young age, Toynbee won scholarships to attend Winchester School from 1902 to 1907, and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Classics and graduated in 1911. Toynbee, a social worker, and Sarah Edith Marshall Toynbee, a historian. Toynbee was born in London on April 14, 1889, the son of Harry V. Despite these criticisms, however, A Study of History endures as a provocative vision of where humanity has been, and why, and where it may be headed. On the other hand, his work was viewed with skepticism by academic historians, many of whom argued that his methods were unscientific and his conclusions unreliable or simply untrue. It won wide readership amongst the general public, especially in the United States, and after World War II Toynbee was hailed as a prophet of his times. Toynbee detects in the rise and fall of civilizations a recurring pattern, and it is the laws of history behind this pattern that he analyzes in A Study of History.įrom the outset, A Study of History was a controversial work. In Toynbee's analysis, this amounts to five living civilizations and sixteen extinct ones, as well as several that Toynbee defines as arrested civilizations. The size of the work is in proportion to the grandeur of Toynbee's purpose, which is to analyze the genesis, growth, and fall of every human civilization ever known. Somervell's abridgement, containing only about one-sixth of the original, runs to over nine hundred pages.

The first ten volumes contain over six thousand pages and more than three million words.

Somervell with Toynbee's cooperation and published in 1947 (volume one) and 1957 (volume two) in London.Ī Study of History in its original form is a huge work. A two-volume abridgement of volumes 1-10 was prepared by D. The first volume was published in London in 1934, and subsequent volumes appeared periodically until the twelfth and final volume was published in London in 1961.

Arnold Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History is one of the major works of historical scholarship published in the twentieth century.