“Toynbee’s life intersected with the climactic events that signified the end of the Ottoman Empire,” writes Arie Dubnov in his forthcoming article in the journal Histories entitled “The Toynbee Affair at 100: the birth of ‘World History’ and the long shadow of the interwar liberal imaginaire.” Oxford-trained Classicist, member of the British Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department, compiler of Lord Bryce’s “Blue Book” on the Armenian Genocide, war correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, inaugural holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History at King’s College London, Toynbee embodies that intertwining of “past politics” and “present history” which Regius Professor of History E. A. Freeman placed at the heart of the Oxford historian’s mission to make history as well as write it. This process by which, to quote the subtitle of Priya Satia’s 2020 book Time’s Monster, “history makes history” is one of the topics addressed in this podcast, recorded on 3 August 2023.

Jon begins by asking Arie how he became interested in this most unfashionable of “big historians”. After addressing the ways in which Toynbee influenced American and Israeli university teaching, Arie and Jon explore some of the earlier historians and classicists who influenced Toynbee: these include Freeman as well as Alfred Zimmern and Gilbert Murray, who became Toynbee’s father-in-law. They then discuss the role played by analogy and federation in early Toynbee, before the conversation turns to the void in Toynbee’s historical vision where one might expect to find consideration of fiscal imperialism and other economic forces, concluding with some reflections on what the recent revival of interest in Toynbee says about the current state of academe and the world at large.

Toynbee directed a production of knowledge in the direction that takes the fundamental hybridity and intermingling of human groups as a problem that needs to be overcome. The disastrous implications of this mode of thinking take us back to the time and place where it was born, a century ago, in the violence of the Greco-Turkish war and in the compulsory “exchange” of minorities.

Arie Dubnov, extract from his forthcoming article.

Episode 38 – The Toynbee Affair

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

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