Reconsidering Arnold J. Toynbee’s world history in mid-twentieth-century Japan

Mizuno, Ryoya (2024) Reconsidering Arnold J. Toynbee’s world history in mid-twentieth-century Japan. Historical Journal. ISSN 0018-246X

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Abstract

Arnold J. Toynbee is considered one of the most crucial figures in the historiography of twentieth-century world history. Although Toynbee’s reputation has significantly waned since the 1950s among many professional historians in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, some renowned world historians, such as William H. McNeill and Jürgen Osterhammel, have reassessed Toynbee as a pioneering European historian who envisaged world history beyond Eurocentrism since the emergence of the field of global and world history in the 1980s. This article reconsiders the global meaning of Toynbee’s world history beyond this historiographical narrative on Toynbee in the anglophone context by revealing that influential Japanese historians had already found significant potential in his world history in the mid-twentieth century, almost three decades before his reassessment in English-speaking academia. In particular, the article demonstrates how Japanese historians, such as Suzuki Shigetaka, Eguchi Bokurō, and Uehara Senroku, received Toynbee’s idea of world history with various motivations and historical contexts. The research also argues that, despite the differences in their receptive intentions and backgrounds, they interpreted Toynbee as a significant European intellectual who made a self-critique of conventional historical studies in Europe and demonstrated the possibility of rewriting world history beyond Eurocentric assumptions.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	International History
Subjects:	D History General and Old World
Date Deposited:	14 Nov 2024 09:54
Last Modified:	06 Jan 2025 08:36
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126074

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