The gigantic crime

We can sum up this statistical enquiry by saying that, as far as our defective information carries us, about an equal number of Armenians in Turkey seem to have escaped, to have perished, and to have survived deportation in 1915; and we shall not be far wrong if, in round numbers, we estimate each of these categories at 600,000.

The exact quantitative scale of the crime thus remains uncertain, but there is no uncertainty as to the responsibility for its perpetration. This immense infliction of suffering and destruction of life was not the work of religious fanaticism. Fanaticism played no more part here than it has played in the fighting at Gallipoli or Kut, and the “Holy War” which the Young Turks caused to be proclaimed in October, 1914, was merely a political move to embarrass the Moslem subjects of the Entente Powers. There was no fanaticism, for instance, in the conduct of the Kurds and chettis [bandits], who committed some of the most horrible acts of all, nor can the responsibility be fixed upon them. They were simply marauders and criminals who did after their kind, and the Government, which not only condoned, but instigated, their actions, must bear the guilt. The peasantry, again (own brothers though they were to the Ottoman soldiery whose apparent humanity at Gallipoli and Kut has won their opponents’ respect), behaved with astonishing brutality to the Armenians who were delivered into their hands; yet the responsibility does not he with the Turkish peasantry. They are sluggish, docile people, unready to take violent action on their own initiative, but capable of perpetrating any enormity on the suggestion of those they are accustomed to obey. The peasantry would never have attacked the Armenians if their superiors had not given them the word. Nor are the Moslem townspeople primarily to blame; their record is not invariably black, and the evidence in this volume throws here and there a favourable light upon their character. Where Moslem and Christian lived together in the same town or village, led the same life, pursued the same vocation, there seems often to have been a strong human bond between them. The respectable Moslem townspeople seldom desired the extermination of their Armenian neighbours, sometimes openly deplored it, and in several instances even set themselves to hinder it from taking effect. We have evidence of this from various places – Adana [footnote: Doc. 128.], for instance, and AF. [footnote: Doc. 126.] in Cilicia, the villages of AJ. and AK. [footnote: Doc. 126.] in the AF. district, and the city of Angora. The authorities had indeed to decree severe penalties against any Moslem as well as any alien or Greek who might be convicted of sheltering their Armenian victims. The rabble naturally looted Armenian property when the police connived, as the rabble in European towns might do; the respectable majority of the Moslem townspeople can be accused of apathy at worst; the responsibility cannot rest with these.

The guilt must, therefore, fall upon the officials of the Ottoman Government, but it will not weigh equally upon all members of the official hierarchy. The behaviour of the gendarmerie, for example, was utterly atrocious; the subordinates were demoralised by the power for evil that was placed in their hands; they were egged on by their chiefs, who gave vent to a malevolence against the Armenians which they must have been harbouring for years; a very large proportion of the total misery inflicted was the gendarmerie’s work; and yet the gendarmerie were not, or ought not to have been, independent agents. The responsibility for their misconduct must be referred to the local civil administrators, or to the Central Government, or to both.

The local administrators of provinces and sub-districts – Valis, Mutessarifs and Kaimakams – are certainly very deeply to blame. The latitude allowed them by the Central Government was wide, as is shown by the variations they practised, in different places, upon the common scheme. In this place the Armenian men were massacred; in that they were deported unscathed; in that other they were taken out to sea and drowned. Here the women were bullied into conversion; here conversion was disallowed; here they were massacred like the men. And in many other matters, such as the disposal of Armenian property or the use of torture, remarkable differences of practice can be observed, which are all ascribable to the good or bad will of the local officials. A serious part of the responsibility falls upon them – upon fire-eaters like Djevdet Bey or cruel natures like the Governor of Ourfa [footnote: Doc. 119.]; and yet their freedom of action was comparatively restricted. Where they were evilly-intentioned towards the Armenians they were able to go beyond the Central Government’s instructions (though even in matters like the exemption of Catholics and Protestants, where their action was apparently most free, they and the Central Government were often merely in collusion) [footnote: See Doc. 87 relating to the town of X.]; but they might never mitigate their instructions by one degree. Humane and honourable governors (and there were a certain number of these) were powerless to protect the Armenians in their province. The Central Government had its agents on the spot – the chairman of the local branch of the Committee of Union and Progress [footnote: Docs. 72 and 128.], the local Chief of Gendarmerie, or even some subordinate official [footnote: Doc. 70.] on the Governor’s own administrative staff. If these merciful governors were merely remiss in executing the instructions, they were flouted and overruled; if they refused to obey them, they were dismissed and replaced by more pliant successors. In one way or another, the Central Government enforced and controlled the execution of the scheme, as it alone had originated the conception of it; and the Young Turkish Ministers and their associates at Constantinople are directly and personally responsible, from beginning to end, for the gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915.

Editor, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce, Hodder & Stoughton and His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916, online here (nearly 600 pages)

Atatürk and Churchill

The only incidents in the two world wars to which posterity might perhaps be able to look back without being abashed at the spectacle of human wickedness and folly were the Turkish people’s resistance in 1919-22 to the recent victors in the First World War and the British people’s resistance in 1940-1 to a temporarily victorious Germany. These two peoples had the spirit to resist though they were facing fearful odds and though they had no apparent prospect of escaping defeat and destruction. Both peoples were fortunate in finding leaders – Mustafa Kamal Atatürk and Winston Churchill – who inspired them to rise to the occasion.

A case of a historian respecting victors. What about all the unsuccessful resistance to Germany, Russia and Japan?

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

The rout of Pan-Islamism by Nationalism

The apparent triumph of our Western Political Nationalism in the Islamic World since the beginning of the twentieth century of our era – and, conspicuously, since the outbreak of the general war of A.D. 1914-18 – is a remarkable testimony to the assimilative power of our Western Civilization and to the inability of the Islamic Civilization to hold its own against it. For the Pan-Islamic Movement, which was set in motion under the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph ʿAbd-al-Hamīd (imperabat A.D. 1876-1909) as an attempt to enable the Islamic World to repel the Western offensive, was not only good strategy on its merits (on the principle that “union is strength”); it was also in the true line of the Islamic tradition; for, from the time of the Hijrah, which was the crucial event in the career of Muhammad and in the history of the institution that he founded, Islam had been a unitary society which embraced both the two Western social fields of Church and State; and, after the founder’s death, the unity of Islam in its political aspect had been incarnated in the Arab Caliphate [...]. Thus the Pan-Islamic attempt to restore the political unity of Islam, under the historic aegis of a Caliphate, in face of a formidable external menace to the Islamic Society’s very existence, might have seemed a promising stroke of statesmanship; and the rapid rout of Pan-Islamism by an irresistible outbreak of Nationalism in the Muslim ranks is a surprising denouement.

[...]

A Study of HIstory, Vol IV, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Cultural diversity in universal states

Owing to the tendency of the parochial states of a broken-down civilization in its Time of Troubles to sharpen their weapons in fratricidal conflicts with one another and to take advantage of this dearly bought increase in their military proficiency to conquer neighbouring societies with their left hands while continuing to fight one another with their right hands, most universal states have embraced not only a fringe of conquered barbarians but substantial slices of the domain of one or more alien civilizations as well. Some universal states, again, have been founded by alien empire-builders, and some have been the product of societies within whose bosoms there has already been some degree of cultural variety even on a reckoning which does not differentiate between march-men and the denizens of the interior of the same social world. [...]

No other universal state known to History appears to have been as homogeneous in culture as Japan under the Tokugawa régime. In “the Middle Empire” of Egypt, in which a fringe of barbarians on the Nubian glacis of its Theban march was one element of variation from the cultural norm of the Egyptiac Society of the age, there was another and more positive feature of cultural diversity in the Empire’s culturally Sumeric provinces and client states in Palestine and Coele Syria. As for “the New Empire”, which was a deliberate revival of the original Egyptiac universal state, it accentuated the pattern of its prototype by completing the assimilation of the barbarians of Nubia and by embracing the domain of an abortive First Syriac Civilization in Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia; and this culturally tripartite structure – in which the cultural domain of the civilization through whose disintegration the universal state has been brought into existence is flanked by culturally alien territories annexed at the expense of both barbarians and neighbouring civilizations – appears to be the standard type.

For example, in the Mauryan Empire, which was the original Indic universal state, an Indic cultural core was flanked by an alien province in the Panjab, which had been at least partially Syriacized during a previous period of Achaemenian rule after having been partially barbarized by an antecedent Völkerwanderung of Eurasian Nomads, while in other quarters the Mauryan Empire’s Indic core was flanked by ex-barbarian provinces in Southern India and possibly farther afield in both Ceylon and Khotan as well. The Guptan Empire, in which the Mauryan was eventually reintegrated, possessed an ex-barbarian fringe, with an alien Hellenic tincture, in the satrapy that had been founded by Saka war-bands in Gujerat and the North-Western Deccan, and a Hellenized fringe, with a Kushan barbarian dilution, in the territories under its suzerainty in the Panjab. In a Han Empire which was the Sinic universal state, the Sinic World proper was flanked by barbarian annexes in what was eventually to become Southern China, as well as on the Eurasian Steppe, and by an alien province in the Tarim Basin, where the Indic, Syriac, and Hellenic cultures had already met and mingled before this cultural corridor and crucible was annexed to the Han Empire for the first time in the second century B.C. and for the second time in the first century of the Christian Era. In the Roman Empire, which was the Hellenic universal state, a culturally Hellenic core in Western Anatolia, Continental European Greece, Sicily, and Italy, with outlying enclaves in Cilicia, in Syria, at Alexandria, and at Marseilles, was combined with the domain of the submerged Hittite Civilization in Eastern Anatolia, with the homelands of the Syriac and Egyptiac civilizations in Syria and in the Lower Nile Valley, with the colonial [Carthaginian] domain of the Syriac Civilization in North-West Africa, and with ex-barbarian hinterlands in North-West Africa and in Western and Central Europe as far as the left bank of the Rhine and the right bank of the Danube. [Footnote: Leaving out of account the late-acquired and early-lost Transdanubian bridgehead in Dacia.]

There are other cases in which this standard cultural pattern has been enriched by some additional element.

In the Muscovite Tsardom, a Russian Orthodox Christian core was flanked by a vast ex-barbarian annex extending northwards to the Arctic Ocean and eastwards eventually to the Pacific, and by an Iranic Muslim annex consisting of the sedentary Muslim peoples of the Volga Basin, the Urals, and Western Siberia. This pattern was afterwards complicated by Peter the Great’s deliberate substitution of a Westernized for a traditional Orthodox Christian cultural framework for the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state, and by the subsequent annexation of additional alien territories – at the expense of the Islamic World on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and at the expense of Western Christendom in the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland.

In the Achaemenian Empire, which was the original Syriac universal state, there was an antecedent cultural diversity, within the Syriac core itself, between the Syrian creators of the Syriac Civilization and their Iranian converts, and a geographical gap between Syria and Iran that was still occupied by the dwindling domain of the gradually disappearing Babylonic culture. The Achaemenian Empire also embraced the domain of the submerged Hittite culture in Eastern Anatolia, the best part of the domain of the Egyptiac Civilization, fringes torn from the Hellenic and Indic worlds, and pockets of partially reclaimed barbarian highlanders and Eurasian Nomads. Moreover, after its life had been prematurely cut short by Alexander the Great, its work was carried on by his political successors, and especially by the Seleucidae, whom it would be more illuminating to describe as alien Hellenic successors of Cyrus and Darius. In the Arab Caliphate, in which the Achaemenian Empire was eventually reintegrated, the Syriac core – in which the earlier diversity between Syrian creators and Iranian converts had been replaced by a cleavage, along approximately the same geographical line, between ex-subjects of the Roman and ex-subjects of the Sasanian Empire – was united politically, by Arab barbarian empire-builders, with barbarian annexes – in North-West Africa, in the fastnesses of Daylam and Tabaristan between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and on the fringes of the Eurasian Steppe adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin – and with fragments of alien civilizations: a slice of the new-born Hindu World in Sind; the potential domain of an abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin; an Orthodox Christian diaspora in Syria and Egypt; and a fossil of the by then elsewhere extinct Babylonic Society at Harran.

In the Mongol Empire, which was a universal state imposed by alien empire-builders on the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, the annexes to a Chinese core were unusually extensive – including, as they did, the whole of the Eurasian Nomad World, the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and the ex-Sasanian portion of a Syriac World which by that time was in extremis. The Mongols themselves were barbarians with a tincture of Far Eastern Christian culture. In the Manchu empire-builders, who subsequently repeated the Mongols’ performance on a less gigantic yet still imposing scale, there was the same tincture in a more diluted form; and the Chinese universal state in its Manchu avatar once again embraced, in addition to its Chinese core, a number of alien annexes: a “reservoir” of barbarians in the still unfelled backwoods and still virgin steppes of Manchuria, the whole of the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist World in Tibet, Mongolia, and Zungaria, and the easternmost continental outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the north-western Chinese provinces of Kansu and Shansi, and the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

In the Ottoman Empire, which provided, or saddled, the main body of Orthodox Christendom with its universal state, the alien ʿOsmanli empire-builders united an Orthodox Christian core with a fringe of Western Christian territory in Hungary, with the whole of the Arabic Muslim World except Morocco, the Sudan, and South-Eastern Arabia, and with pockets of barbarians and semi-barbarians in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, the Mani, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and on the Arabian Steppe. In the Mughal Empire, which was the Ottoman Empire’s counterpart in the Hindu World, the pattern was simpler, since, apart from the Iranic Muslim empire-builders and their co-religionists who had been deposited in the Hindu social environment by earlier waves of invasion from the Middle East and Central Asia [since the twelfth century], the Mughals’ only [sic] non-Hindu subjects were the Pathan barbarian highlanders on the north-western fringe of their dominions. When, however, the Mughal Rāj was replaced by a British Rāj, the pattern of the Hindu universal state became more complex; for the advent of a new band of alien empire-builders, which substituted a Western element for an Islamic at the political apex of the Hindu universal state, did not expel the Indian Muslims from the stage of Hindu history, but merely depressed their status to that of a numerically still formidable alien element in the Hindu internal proletariat, so that the Hindu universal state in its second phase combined elements drawn from two alien civilizations with a Pathan barbarian fringe and a Hindu core.

There had been other universal states in which, as in the Mughal Empire, the cultural pattern had been less complex than the standard type yet not so simple as that of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric universal state, included no representatives of an alien civilization – unless Byblus and other Syrian coast-towns are to be counted as such in virtue of their tincture of Egyptiac culture. On the other hand, the Sumeric Civilization itself was represented in two varieties at least – a Sumero-Akkadian and an Elamite – and in no less than three if the domain of the Indus Culture should prove also to have been included in “the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World”. Moreover, the Babylonian Amorites, who eventually restored a polity that had been first constructed by the Sumerian Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur, were not merely marchmen but marchmen with a barbarian tinge. So, on a broader and a longer view, the cultural pattern of the Sumeric universal state proves to have been less homogeneous than might appear at first sight. “The thalassocracy of Minos”,  again, which was the Minoan universal state, probably included representatives of the continental Mycenaean variety of the Minoan culture as well as the creators of that culture in its Cretan homeland, even if it did not embrace any representatives of an alien civilization.

In the Central American World, two once distinct sister societies – the Yucatec Civilization and the Mexic – had not yet lost their distinctive characteristics, though they had already been brought together by force of Toltec arms, when the task, and prize, of establishing a Central American universal state was snatched, at the eleventh hour, out of the hands of barbarian Aztec empire-builders by Spanish representatives of an utterly alien Western Christendom. In the Andean World the Empire of the Incas, which was the Andean universal state, already included representatives of the Kara variety of the Andean culture [...] before the indigenous Incan empire-builders were suddenly and violently replaced by Spanish conquistadores from Western Christendom who turned the Andean World upside-down, with a vigour reminiscent of Alexander the Great’s, by proceeding to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and to variegate the social map by studding it with immigrant Spanish landlords and self-governing municipalities.

The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which served as a carapace for Western Christendom against the assaults of the ʿOsmanlis, and which, seen from the south-east, wore the deceptive appearance of being a full-blown Western universal state, set itself, like the Tokugawa Shogunate, to achieve domestic cultural uniformity, but lacked both the ruthlessness and the insularity which, between them, enabled the Japanese isolationists for a time to put their policy into effect. In pursuing its aim of being totally Catholic, the Hapsburg Power did succeed, more or less, in extirpating Protestantism within its frontiers; but the very success of its stand, and eventual counter-attack, against the Ottoman embodiment of an Orthodox Christian universal state broke up the Danubian Monarchy’s hardly attained Catholic homogeneity by transferring to Hapsburg from Ottoman rule a stiff-necked minority of Hungarian Protestants and a host of Orthodox Christians of divers nationalities, most of whom proved unwilling to accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, even when the yoke was proffered in the easy form of Uniatism [union with Rome and retention of local rites], while, among those who did accept this relatively light burden, the rank and file remained nearer in heart and mind to their dissident Orthodox ex-co-religionists than they ever came to be to their fellow Catholics who were of the Latin Rite.

The [post-Assyrian] Neo-Babylonian Empire [or Chaldean Empire], which was the Babylonic universal state, similarly forfeited its cultural purity – and thereby worked unwittingly for the eventual extinction of the Babylonic Civilization itself – when Nebuchadnezzar conquered and annexed the homeland of the Syriac Civilization west of the Euphrates; and the impress of the indigenous Babylonic culture became progressively fainter as the domain which Nebuchadnezzar had bequeathed to a short line of native successors was incorporated first into the barbaro-Syriac Empire of the Achaemenids and then into the Hellenic Empire of the Seleucids.

Our survey has shown that, in the cultural composition of universal states, a high degree of diversity is the rule; and, in the light of this fact, it is evident that one effect of the “conductivity” of universal states is to carry farther, by less violent and less brutal means, that process of cultural pammixia that is started, in the antecedent Times of Troubles, by the atrocities that these bring in their train. The refugees, exiles, deportees, transported slaves, and other déracinés of the more cruel preceding age are followed up, under the milder régime of a universal state, by merchants, by professional soldiers, and by philosophic and religious missionaries and pilgrims who make their transit with less tribulation in a more genial social climate.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The old Islamic order

The military vs the militant.

The Silk Road

Maps of the Silk Road differ and are often approximate if not inaccurate. Nor is there one Silk Road. I’ll take this one, which appears to be in the public domain, as a simple reference. It shows the main route from Chang’an, now Xi’an, in Shaanxi province, going north and south of the Taklamakan desert or Tarim Basin. The westernmost city in modern China here is Kashgar or Kashi. From there the road passes through Tajikistan (and perhaps Kyrgyzstan) into Uzbekistan – in other words, through Sogdiana – and from there into Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria.

This does not show an alternative southern route which began west of Kashgar and passed through Bactria, north of the Hindu Kush, before rejoining the main route north of Merv.

Another road left China to cross the Karakoram into what is now Pakistan.

The Silk Road is not a steppe route. It runs south of the steppe. It is a mountain and desert route.

Buddhism entered China on the Silk Road via the Kushan Empire in the first century of the Christian era.

Critical Muslim

Newish Granta-format quarterly published by the UK-based Muslim Institute.

Editors: Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab.

International advisory board: Karen Armstrong, William Dalrymple, Anwar Ibrahim, Arif Mohammad Khan, Bruce Lawrence, Ebrahim Moosa, Ashis Nandy.

I worried about the title at first, but I suppose the implication is fair.

Issue 1: The Arabs Are Alive

Issue 2: The Idea of Islam

Issue 3: Fear and Loathing

Issue 4: forthcoming on Pakistan

Subscribe

The Greek Fathers

(Those who wrote in Greek. Can one speak of Koine for the last two?)

Irenaeus of Lyons (?-c 202)

Clement of Alexandria (c 150-c 215)

Origen of Alexandria (c 184-c 253)

Athanasius of Alexandria (c 297-373)

The Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea (c 329-379), Gregory Nazianzus (c 329-389), Gregory of Nyssa (c 335-after 394), Peter of Sebaste (c 340-391)

John Chrysostom (c 347-407)

Cyril of Alexandria (c 378-444)

Maximus the Confessor (c 580-662)

John of Damascus (c 676-749)

The Apostolic Fathers

The Apostolic Fathers are believed to have been taught directly by one or more of the twelve.

Clement of Rome

Ignatius of Antioch

Polycarp of Smyrna

The Didache and Shepherd of Hermas are considered to be by Apostolic Fathers although their authors are unknown. Like the works of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp, they were written in Koine Greek.

The significant experience

In the encounter between the world and the West that has been going on by now for four or five hundred years, the world, not the West, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first.

The World and the West, OUP, 1953

Ahmet and Gokhan

The Turkish pink certificate.

There is no right of conscientious objection in the Turkish army.

Mediterranean

John F Guilmartin, review of David Abulafia, The Great Sea, A Human History of the Mediterranean, OUP, 2011, in The American Interest, March/April 2012. How it differs from Braudel.

The bay of Carthage

Braudel’s main works:

La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II, 3 volumes, 1949 (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; there is also a one-volume abridgement)

Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle, 3 volumes, 1967, 1979, 1979 (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century)

L’identité de la France, 2 volumes, 1986 (unfinished) (The Identity of France)

Grammaire des civilisations, 1987 (a world history, posthumous) (A History of Civilizations)

Les mémoires de la Méditerranée, 1998 (posthumous) (The Mediterranean in the Ancient World)

“[W]hen I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.” (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World)

The Sultan and the Allies

It is amusing to note that the British Government’s relations with the Sultan during the Allied occupation of Constantinople [1918-23] were attacked by the Turkish Nationalists and by the Indian Moslems with equal bitterness, but with diametrically opposite presumptions as to their character. Apparently the Indians considered that the Sultan was a prisoner under duress, and that the British Government were restraining him from exercising his lawful authority as Caliph of Islam. Undoubtedly the Turkish Nationalists regarded him as an opponent of constitutional government and almost as a traitor to his country, who was lending himself to British designs against their movement in the hope of recovering the autocratic power formerly enjoyed by Abdu’l-Hamid. In the Indians’ eyes he was a tragic captive, in his own countrymen’s a sordid tool.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

Etruscan sadism

The acceleration in the process of the Hellenization of Etruria between the sixth and the fourth century B.C. is graphically recorded in the wall-paintings at Caere (Cervetri). On the other hand, in their depiction of the torments inflicted on the damned in Hell, the Etruscan painters betray an un-Hellenic vein of sadism in the Etruscan êthos which was incidentally communicated to the Roman pupils in an Etruscan school of Hellenism, and which reappears even in a latter-day Tuscan Dante’s Divina Commedia. The origin of this sinister streak in the Etruscan tradition is a mystery. It makes the impression of being of non-Hellenic provenance (though the torments of the damned do figure in Hellenic art and legend); and it is a matter of recorded history that the institution of gladiatorial shows, which was perhaps the most atrocious of all the cruel practices that the Romans learnt from Etruscan instructors, was so abhorrent to Greek feelings that it never gained any foothold in Greek communities under Roman rule. The inference is that this Etruscan sadism was an element in the Etruscans’ Anatolian heritage which was too near to the heart of their tradition for the counter-influence of Hellenism to be able to eliminate it. Yet, if the origin of Etruscan sadism may be Anatolian, it can hardly be Hittite; for, to judge by the surviving corpus of Hittite legislation, the Hittite Civilization was as humane as the Hellenic.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Syracuse, Nicea, Trabzon and Arta

The degree of the enemy pressure [Persian, Arab, Slavic] on fortress-Constantinople in the seventh century can be gauged by the remarkable facts that in 618 or 619 even the heroic Emperor Heraclius was with difficulty deterred from evacuating it, and that in 662 Heraclius’s grandson the Emperor Constans II did transfer the Empire’s capital to Syracuse. However, after Constans’ assassination at Syracuse in 668, the capital immediately reverted to Constantinople; and it reverted again in 1261 from Nicea – the seat of the refugee-capital of the principal surviving fragment of the East Roman Empire after the capture of Constantinople and the seizure of the major part of the Empire’s European dominions by the Venetians and the French in and after 1204.

Constans’s twelve-day visit to Rome in 663 was the first by an Emperor since the fall of the Empire in the west. There was, I think, only one after it: a desperate one by John VIII Palaiologos in 1423, which led to the Union of Florence.

The Empire of Nicea was founded by the Laskaris family and was the largest of three states founded by aristocrats fleeing the Fourth Crusade. The recapture of Constantinople in 1261 was launched from here. The modern city is İznik.

The Empire of Trabzon or Trebizond was founded by the Komnenos family with support of Queen Tamar of Georgia. It ruled part of the Black Sea coast until 1461, when its ruler, David, surrendered to the Ottoman Mehmed II. (I collect historical Davids, so there’s another: David of Trebizond.) Wikipedia: “Its demographic legacy endured for several centuries after the Ottoman conquest in 1461, and a substantial number of Greek Orthodox inhabitants (called Pontic Greeks) remained in the area until the early 20th century. At that time, the remainder of Orthodox Christian inhabitants in the area were deported to Greece (starting in 1923), as determined by the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This agreement did not include local Muslims who spoke Greek dialects, who live in the Trebizond area to the present day.”

The Despotate of Epirus was founded on the Greek mainland by the Komnenos Doukas family and survived, under different dynasties, until the Ottomans took it 1479. Its capital was at Arta, with an interlude in Ioannina.

First sentence of Rose Macaulay’s novel The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

On June 1 1997 in Trabzon I met two unforgettable brothers: Ali Kemal Yılmaz and Yusuf Ziya Yılmaz.

Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970

Manzikert 1071

Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish nomads from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world [including Iran] as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam. As champions of the [Abbasid] caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels’ encroachment on the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic Empire’s progress in Armenia, and in A. D. 1071 – five years after the Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the making of England – the Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd [Manzikert] that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to Greece.

Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after tribe crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities were isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses [caravanserais] built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced. The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable. He imposed his language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life, though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake, bridge, and village in the country took on a Turkish name, and a new nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the supreme enemy of the race.

This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire’s doom. Robbed of its Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal regime of the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers, about the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula. Raids across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade.

Manzikert is the traditional English spelling. The modern Turkish is Malazgirt. The victor was the third Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan. His Byzantine opponent was Romanos IV Diogenes.

Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915

Achaei, Zygi, Heniochi

Strabo, writing on the morrow of the establishment of the Augustan Peace, makes the following observation at the end of his description of the piratical raids into the domain of the Hellenic universal state which were at that time the main source of livelihood for the barbarians (Achaei, Zygi, Heniochi) inhabiting the strip of inhospitable country between the crest of the North-Western Caucasus Range and the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea: “In places under [the] autocratic rule [of princes of client states of the Roman Empire] the victims [of these piratical raids] are afforded some protection by their rulers; for the princes make frequent counter-attacks and bring the war-canoes down, crews and all. The territory under direct Roman administration receives less effective protection owing to the indifference shown by the non-permanent lieutenant-governors sent out from Rome” (Strabo: Geographica, Book XI, chap. 11, § 12 (C 496)).

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

English monasteries – St Basil of Caesarea

Independent obituary in 2003 of PLF’s wife Joan – “not religious – just saintly”.

Four Leigh Fermor posts should have been enough, but I can’t leave him without something about monasteries. In A Time to Keep Silence (1957), he shows himself philo-Catholic, at least in that matter, rather like Toynbee. I don’t know that he ever called himself religious.

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(Extract, from the end of the book, deemed fair use. Please contact me directly if you disagree. Contains interpolations by me. Link above is to Amazon.)

“I am writing [...] on the sill of a top-storey window in a Benedictine priory in Hampshire. [...]

“In surroundings like these the fate of the old monasteries which were once scattered all over England comes inevitably to mind once more and makes their disappearance seem doubly sad. Their names, those landmarks of a different and vanished world – ring in the ears in fortuitous and pleasant-sounding threes: Glastonbury, Tewkesbury and Gloucester; Sherborne, Much Wenlock and Fountains; Tintern, Montacute and Cleeve; Pershore, Abingdon and Lacock; Babington, Romsey and Ford; Littleshall, Valle Crucis and Maxstoke; Newstead, Abergavenny and Bolton; Welbeck, Canons Ashby and St Michael’s Mount. And how many more! England could ill afford their loss. But, though one may regret their passing, the small family of their spiritual descendants which has grown up in modern times offers us all that was most precious in the past. They began to reappear in England as soon as the relaxation of legal disabilities would allow, and there are now something under a thousand monks and about fifteen monastic foundations in England and Scotland and Wales. [Footnote: These approximate figures refer to the male religious communities living in conventual enclosure; and should not be confused with the semi-conventual and secular orders which outnumber them many times over.]

“Cistercians [Cîteaux Abbey founded 1098; reformed Benedictines; Bernard of Clairvaux joined them; Trappists are an offshoot] are established in Pugin’s abbey at Mount Saint Bernard in Leicestershire, at Caldey in Wales, and at Nunraw in Scotland; and Carthusians [order founded in the Chartreuse Mountains in 1084 by St Bruno of Cologne; its monasteries are called charterhouses] inhabit England’s only active charterhouse at Parkminster in Sussex. Their origins are very diverse. Two of the great Benedictine abbeys of the English Congregation – Downside and Ampleforth – had already existed for two centuries in exile before removing from Flanders to Somerset and from Lorraine to Yorkshire nearly a century and a half ago. The French – now largely English – community at Quarr in the Isle of Wight, emigrating from Solesmes [where the monks had led a revival of monastic life after its suppression in the Revolution] as a result of the anticlerical legislation in France at the beginning of the century [Waldeck-Rousseau’s anticlerical Law of Associations, 1901; it was followed in 1905 by the Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State, which ended the funding of religious groups by the state], followed exactly the same process in reverse. The other monasteries of the English [Benedictine] Congregation are Douai in Berkshire; Fort Augustus – imposing conventual buildings gathered round the nucleus of a highland fortress presented to the Order by the Lovat family; Belmont in Herefordshire; and Ealing near London, which was founded from Downside in 1898. [Douai also moved from France to England at the beginning of the twentieth century.] The Abbey of Ramsgate belongs to a branch of the Benedictine Order known as the Cassinese Congregation of Primitive Observance, from the stern outpost of which, at Pierre-qui-Vire, near Vezelay in France, Buckfast in Devon was also founded, and then built by the monks themselves on the site of pre-Conquest Benedictine and twelfth-century Cistercian remains. The story of Prinknash Abbey [it’s pronounced Prinich] is certainly the strangest. In 1896, an Anglican community of monks settled in Caldey, a wild and often storm-bound island off the coast of Pembrokeshire, the haunt of puffins and guillemots and, formerly, of the Cornish chough. There, still within the fold of the Church of England and living in isolation and great hardship, they followed the Rule of St Benedict, and finally, after seventeen years, the whole community, with the exception of two, were received into the Church of Rome. After a short novitiate they took their vows as Benedictine monks and eventually became the founders of the Abbey of Prinknash in the Gloucestershire woods. They are allowed by the Pope, as a special privilege, to retain the white habits, instead of the customary Benedictine black, which they had first adopted as an Anglican brotherhood. Cistercians have now settled in the wild island of their origin. Prinknash has two dependent priories. One of them, a company of twelve, inhabits the half-ruined buildings of the thirteenth-century abbey of Pluscarden, near Elgin in the Highlands, where they took root four years ago. The other is Farnborough whose monks, till the arrival of the present community from Prinknash, were, like those of Quarr, originally drawn from Solesmes; and the part of the monastery in which I am lodged is built on the same massive, romanesque and neo-mediaeval lines as that enormous pile. The priory church, however, is a fine flamboyant building. Gargoyles, crochets, finials and vanes adorn it at every point and it is crowned with a slightly anomalous dome that serves as a landmark across the surrounding fields. This was the inspiration of the foundress, the exiled and widowed Empress Eugénie, who lived the last years of her life in retirement near by. Three vast sarcophagi in the crypt mark the resting places of Napoleon III, of the Empress and of their son, the Prince Imperial, whose body was brought here after he was killed while  serving as a British officer in the Zulu Wars.

“A letter from a friend who is a monk at Pluscarden briefly describes his priory in the following words: ‘The monastery was founded in 1230 in one of the most beautiful places in Scotland. The church is still standing, without a roof, however; but one wing was restored and made habitable at the beginning of the last century. There is a small, exquisite chapel for which one of the brothers has made a wooden choir-screen and stalls which are worthy of the original. The chapter-house is a vaulted stone room with a central pillar and in one half of it there is a big open fireplace in which we keep a huge log-fire burning. The refectory is another vaulted stone room, very plain, with deal tables and whitewashed walls, and most beautiful. It is very cold and we have had snow constantly, but we manage to keep warm and I am really enjoying it. It is certainly the most primitive monastic life I have ever lived … ’

“It was the same friend who introduced me, many months ago, to the earliest monastic letters in existence, those of the great St Basil of Caesarea. Living in the fourth century, St Basil was the first to change the eremitical way of the desert into an organised cenobitic life governed by a system of monastic laws; and it was on his legislation that St Benedict modelled his momentous code a century and a half later. It is interesting, in view of the aura of sadness with which many of its externals have invested monasticism for the outside world, to turn back to these early writings. ‘Light’, ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’ are the epithets, often recurring, that St Basil finds most fitting to capture the atmosphere of his cloister; and he uses the words, not with the specialised and often threadbare meanings that they may have acquired in ecclesiastical apologetics and propaganda, but in the sense they possessed in the literature of the ancient world. His long letters, many of them addressed to his friend St Gregory Nazianzen, are leavened with charm and lightness and humour. The polished Greek sentences are sprinkled with classical allusions one would expect more readily in the writings of a fifteenth-century humanist than in those of a Doctor of the Church living in the reign of Julian. His monastery was built on a flank of the Pontic mountains overlooking the Euxine Sea, in surroundings that sound very different from the fierce volcanic expanse of his native Cappadocia. ‘There indeed,’ he writes, ‘God showed me a position exactly fitting to my taste, so that I really beheld just such a place as I have often been wont in idle reverie to fashion in my imagination. There is a high mountain covered with a thick forest and watered on its northerly side by cool and translucent brooks. At its base is stretched out an evenly sloping plain, ever enriched by the moisture from the mountain. A forest of many-coloured and various trees – a spontaneous growth surrounding the place – acts almost as a hedge to close it in, so that even Calypso’s isle, which Homer seems to admire beyond all others for its beauty, is insignificant compared to this.’ His letter ends with the words: … ‘You will forgive me for hastening, as I do, to this place, for, after all, not even Alcmaeon, after he discovered the Echinades, could endure to wander more.’ There is a mood of humanity and simplicity in his writings, an absence of bigotry that seems to blow like a soft wind from those groves of olive and tamarind and lentisk; gently ruffling the surface of the mind and then leaving it quiet and still. And, while the daylight vanishes from these northern hayfields, it is a similar blessing, an ancient wisdom exorcising the memory of the conflict and bloodshed of the intervening centuries, that brings its message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit.”

He offers a footnote on Anglican communities:

“The two brothers [from Caldey Island] who remained in the Church of England became the founders of Nashdom, which is one of the best known of the Anglican communities that follow the monastic way of life. These, and the many Anglican sisterhoods that wear the conventual habit and observe, with the greatest austerity, the Rules of St Benedict, St Augustine [13th-century mendicant], St Bernard and St Francis of Assisi [13th-century mendicant] – even following, in some cases, the precepts of two post-Reformation saints of the Church of Rome, SS Vincent de Paul and Martin of Sales – are indications of the spiritual distance that has been travelled since the Reformation and the writing of Areopagitica. Some foundations are devoted to works of mercy, others pursue the contemplative life; one or two even observe the Cistercian vow of silence. The earliest of these Anglican sisterhoods, the Society of the Holy Trinity (now established at Ascot), was founded in 1845, at the height of the movement in the Church of England which is linked with the names of Pusey, Keble and Newman [whose rule did it follow?]; and, nine years later, sisters from this community accompanied Florence Nightingale to the Crimea.” I’ll do a post on nuns generally at some point.

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Wikipedia list of monasteries dissolved between 1535 and 1540 by Henry VIII. Of course incomplete, since there had been over eight hundred religious houses before the Reformation.

Fuller Wikipedia lists of abbeys and priories, friaries and other religious houses past and present (priories are smaller monasteries):

Abbeys and priories in England
Abbeys and priories on the Isle of Man
Abbeys and priories in Northern Ireland
List of religious houses in Scotland
Abbeys and priories in Wales

The first English monastic foundation after the Dissolution (ignoring secret foundations and the abortive Marian revival, when a monastery was reopened at Westminster Abbey) was the Cistercian abbey of Mount St Bernard in 1835.

Some extant orders not mentioned here: Cluniac (reformed Benedictine, founded by William I, Duke of Aquitaine, in 910 and one of the major religious forces in Europe until c 1130; eclipsed by the Cistercians); Carmelite (founded by a Crusader, St Bertold, at Mount Carmel in present-day Israel, c 1155, mendicant); Dominican (13th-century mendicant); Capuchin (16th-century mendicant, offshoot of the Franciscans).

Another Leigh Fermor passage, quoted at On an Overgrown Path.

David Knowles: the great historian of English monasticism.

Demonising Turks

Or, in the nineteenth-century language of contempt, “the Turk”.

The concrete actions of Western Powers in war and diplomacy have mattered less, for good or evil, than the overwhelming though imponderable “suggestion” exercised upon the Turkish by the Western mind. We have injured the Turks most by making them hopeless and embittered. Our scepticism has been so profound and our contempt so vehement, that they have almost ceased to regard it as possible to modify them by their own action. They incline to accept these Western attitudes as fixed stars in their horoscope, with a fatalism which we incorrectly attribute to the teaching of their religion, without realising that our own conduct has been one of its potent causes. But while they are discouraged, they are not deadened to resentment. They see us in a light in which we too seldom look at ourselves, as hypocrites who make self-righteous professions a cloak for unscrupulous practice; and their master-grievance against us so fills their minds that it leaves little room for self-examination. If a charge is brought against them from a Western source, that is almost enough in itself to make them harden their hearts against it, however just it may be. They do not get so far as to consider it on its merits. They plead “not guilty,” and put themselves in a posture of defence, to meet what experience has led them to regard as one of the most effective strokes in the Western tactic of aggression. In 1921, I seldom found the Turks defend the fearful atrocities which they had committed six years previously against the Armenians, but repentance and shame for them were not uppermost in their minds – not, I believe, because they were incapable of these feelings, but because they were preoccupied by indignation at the conduct of the Allied Powers in fomenting a war-after-the-war in Anatolia. Remorse cannot easily co-exist with a grievance, and until we relieve the Turks of the one, we shall certainly fail, as we have done hitherto, to inspire them with the other.

This was not received wisdom in 1922. Much of it applies today rather obviously to Iran, which has suffered from Russian, British or American aggression for most of the past two hundred years.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

The Arab return

Robin Yassin-Kassab: “Arabs never really achieved independence, for a variety of reasons. Corrupt elites in authoritarian Arab states have plundered the people’s wealth, obeyed the dictates of hostile superpowers against the people’s will, and entirely failed to build reasonable education or social welfare institutions. Civil society has been stifled. Now it seems that the Arab people are entering the power equation, and true independence may be at hand.”

There is a bigger picture here. After the Abbasid Caliphate, the Arab countries were to a great extent controlled by non-Arabs: Mongols, Mamluks, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Europeans and at the end by unrepresentative elites supported by the West. Libya has been a maverick, but the Berbers, too, had come under Ottoman and European control. This is, in a way, an attempt at a return.

The inheritors of the Ottoman Empire

Though the discomfiture by British arms of a moribund Mughal Empire’s local viceroy in Bengal might do little to upset Islamic complacency, and might be regarded in the West mainly as an incident in a struggle over India between Great Britain and France, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Russia in the Great Russo-Turkish War of A.D. 1768-74 was taken everywhere as a portent; and, when in A.D. 1798 the French descended upon the Ottoman dominion of Egypt, and overcame all resistance there with ease, as a step towards reopening in India a contest with their British rivals which had been decided there against France in the Seven Years’ War, even shrewd observers took it for granted that they would live to see the Ottoman Empire partitioned between France, Russia, Great Britain, and the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy. Yet this expectation, natural though it was at the time, was not fulfilled in the event; for the only parts of the Ottoman Empire, within its frontiers of A.D. 1768, which were in the possession of any of those foreign Powers in A.D. 1952 were the territories adjoining the north and east coasts of the Black Sea, from Bessarabia to Batum inclusive, which had fallen to Russia; Cyprus, which had fallen to Great Britain; and Tunisia and Algeria, which had fallen to France. As for the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which had held Bosnia-Herzegovina from A.D. 1878 to A.D. 1918 and the sanjāq of Novipazār from A.D. 1879 to A.D. 1908, she had voluntarily evacuated Novipazār and had lost Bosnia-Herzegovina in the act of losing her own existence. [Footnote: The occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in and after A.D. 1878, and annexation of this occupied Ottoman territory in A.D. 1908, had, indeed, been nails driven into the Hapsburg Monarchy’s coffin by its own statesmen’s hands, since these Hapsburg acts of aggression against a moribund Ottoman Empire had had the effect of bringing the Monarchy into a head-on collision with a youthful Serb nationalism.] The lion’s share of the Ottoman Empire of A.D. 1768, from Bosnia to the Yaman and from Tripolitania [footnote: A “Libya” consisting of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fazzān, which had been conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Italy in A.D. 1911-12, and from Italy by Great Britain in the general war of A.D. 1939-45, had attained independence on the 24th December, 1951.] to Moldavia inclusive, had passed into the hands, not of alien Great Powers, but of Orthodox Christian and Muslim successor-states, of which the largest in area – apart from a mostly arid Sa‘ūdī Arabia – was a Turkish Republic stretching from Adrianople to Mount Ararat.

A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954

Anatolian regions

Simple but useful. Click to enlarge.

Istanbul, Lagos, London

The historic areas and buildings of Istanbul may be about to lose their UNESCO World Heritage status: BBC. Hürriyet Daily News: A city unable to care for even its Muslim treasures. The Ottoman wooden houses, the quiet streets left to themselves, are being pulled down. The equivalent has been destroyed in other places, so why not here? Many had recently been left to rough rural and other immigrants. (Cairo is unable to protect its Van Gogh.)

The photogenic scaffolding in Hagia Sophia (a museum, not a holy building) was removed earlier this year after seventeen years. Istanbul (with Essen and Pécs) is a European Capital of Culture. Would it have come down otherwise?

BBC series on Lagos now on YouTube starts here. Recommended at Marginal Revolution.

An East Asian or Second Empire approach to London would be to demolish most of the boroughs of Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark and build a new greater South Bank (I hope like neither Dubai nor Poundbury) to balance the historic city on the north bank.

Arts of Asia

Just a nod to one of my favourite magazines, published from Hong Kong since 1971. Ideal bathroom reading.

Frankish tortoise, Visigothic and Arab hares

The organized and purposeful military campaigns of the Muslim Arabs were very different from the half automatic and barely conscious pressure of their ancestors against the yielding desert-frontier of a decaying Seleucid Empire in the second and the last century B.C. They are more comparable to the momentary Arab occupation of the Syrian, Egyptian, and Anatolian territories of the Roman Empire under Palmyrene leadership in the third century of the Christian Era. But they utterly surpassed both these anticipatory reconnaissances in the potency of their driving-force. [Footnote: This immense superiority, in potency, of the third of the three Arab offensives against the Hellenic World was almost certainly due to the most conspicuous of its distinctive features: that is to say, to the fact of its having been launched under the auspices of Islam. [...]] While the Arab encroachments in the last two centuries B.C. had got no farther than the line of the Lebanon and the Orontes, [footnote: See Jones, A. H. M.: The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford 1937, Clarendon Press), pp. 255-6.] and the momentary Palmyrene conquests in the third century of the Christian Era had come to a halt at the banks of the Nile and of the Black Sea Straits, the Muslim Arab conquerors penetrated as far as their Palmyrene predecessors towards the north-west, while on the south-west they left them far behind. In Asia Minor the Constantinopolitan Government succeeded – at the price of abandoning its commitments and cutting its losses on all other fronts – in pushing the Muslim Arabs back from the line of the Straits to the line of the Taurus and holding them there at the cost of grievously overstraining and fatally deforming the nascent body social of Orthodox Christendom. In Africa, however, the wave of Muslim Arab conquest swept on from the Nile to the Atlantic – meeting and overpowering and, carrying along with it the lesser wave of Berber aggression which was at that time breaking, likewise for the third time, upon the remnant of the African domain which Rome had inherited from Carthage.

Justinian had expelled the Vandals from the Maghreb.

The two earlier waves of Berber aggression had been, first, the Numidian intervention in the Second Punic, or Hannibalic, War and the Numidian King Jugurtha’s war with Rome (these are taken together) during the Hellenic “Time of Troubles” and, second, renewed pressure during the shorter crisis of the middle of the third century CE.

At the Straits of Gibraltar the united Arab and Berber wings of the Afrasian Nomad forces collided with the epigoni of the Visigoths, who had settled down in the Iberian Peninsula at the end of a Völkerwanderung which had carried them across the whole breadth of the Roman Empire from a starting-point on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe. When these Gothic pupils of the Eurasian Nomads now encountered the Afrasian Nomad invaders of the Roman Empire at a point on the Empire’s extreme western verge which was almost equally remote from the original mustering-grounds of both the rival war-bands, it was the Afrasian Nomadism that was victorious; [footnote: The victory of the Afrasian Nomads over the Visigothic representatives of the Eurasian Nomadism at Xeres [modern Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia], on the Iberian threshold of Europe, in A.D. 711, has the same piquancy as the victory of the Indian over the African elephants at Raphia, on the Egyptian threshold of Africa, in 217 B.C.] for the united Arab-Berber forces were not flung back from the Straits of Gibraltar by Roderick in A.D. 711 as the Arabs were flung back from the Bosphorus by Constantine IV in A.D. 677 and again in A.D. 718 by Leo Syrus. Scattering the Goths like chaff, the Arabs and Berbers pressed on across the Pyrenees and reached the banks of the Rhône and the Loire before they collided with the Franks and fared as ill at their hands in A.D. 732 on the road to Tours as the ancestors of the Arabs’ discomfited Gothic adversaries had fared at the same Frankish hands at Vouillé in A.D. 507. It was characteristic of the heavy-footed gait of the sedentary North European barbarians that, at dates which were two hundred and twenty-five years apart, they should win their successive victories over their mobile rivals from the Ukraine and the Hijāz on battlefields that were something less than twenty miles distant from one another as the crow flies. [Footnote: The battle between the Austrasians and the Arabs which is traditionally known by the name of Tours seems actually to have been fought in the neighbourhood of Old Poictiers [sic], in the angle between the rivers Elain and Vienne.] Charles Martel allowed the Arabs to come that much nearer to the home territory of the Frankish Power in the basins of the Seine and the Rhine [footnote: Charles Martel’s sluggishness in marching to the help of the Aquitanians in A.D. 732 may be compared with the sluggishness of the Spartans in coming to the Athenians’ aid in 490 B.C. and again in 479 B.C.] than Clovis had allowed the Visigoths to advance in the same direction before marching out to defeat them; but the event was the same. At Tours in A.D. 732, as at Vouillé in A.D. 507, the immovable Franks remained masters of the field.

These Frankish victories over Goths and Arabs were a double triumph for the tortoise who had been content to crawl from the Rhine to the Loire during the time that it had taken one hare to sprint from the Ukraine, and another to sprint from the Hijāz, to the tortoise’s doorstep in Aquitaine. In this contest between the barbarians for the division of the Hellenic dominant minority’s territorial spoils the race was certainly not to the swift, though the battle may have been to the strong. [Footnote: Ecclesiastes ix. 11.] But this revelation of the relative strengths of the rival barbarian war-bands is not the main interest of the two battles in which they tried conclusions with one another. The outstanding historical event to which the battles of Vouillé and Tours bear witness is not the discomfiture of the Goths and the Arabs by the Frank, but the collapse of the resistance of the Roman Power which had been the common arch-adversary of all the three combatants. By the time when, in the heart of the Orbis Romanus, the war-bands from beyond one of the four anti-barbarian frontiers encountered and defeated – on derelict Roman ground – the war-bands from beyond each of the other three frontiers, it was manifest that the third of the three attempts of the external proletariat to take the Hellenic universal state by storm had been completely and definitively successful.

The four frontiers are defined in an earlier passage as

the front against the sedentary barbarians of Continental Europe from the North Sea coast to Transylvania; the front against the Eurasian Nomads (and the Nomadicized sedentary intruders upon the Nomads’ ranges) in the Lower Danubian bay and the Middle Danubian enclave of the Great Eurasian Steppe; the front against the barbarians in the interior of North West Africa (Nomads on the Sahara and highlanders in the Atlas); and the front against the Arabs beyond the desert-coast of Syria who constituted the Asiatic wing of the Afrasian Nomad forces.

The two earlier attempts to take the universal state had been, first, the series of attacks – by Sarmatians, Arabs, Numidians, Cimbri, Teutones, Suevi – in the last two centuries BC during the Hellenic “Time of Troubles” (he treats this as a single crisis) and, second, the attacks – by Goths, Arabs, Berbers, Franks, Alemanni – of the crisis of the middle of the third century CE.

Perhaps one could quibble with this by pointing out that, according to Toynbee’s own system, the first attempt was an attack on the society before it had had a universal state (the Roman Empire) imposed on it.

In the third attempt

the action opened on the Eurasian front, where the eruption of the Hun Nomads blew the nomadicized [lower case this time] Goths right off the Steppe into the far interior of the Roman body politic – as rocks and trees are uprooted and hurled through the air by an exploding shell. From the end of the fourth century to the end of the sixth the pressure continued to be heavier on this front than on any other, as the ebb of the Hun wave was followed by the onrush of the Avar wave, and the vacuum left by the violent propulsion of the Goths was filled by the gentle infiltration of the Slavs. It was only in the seventh century, when the onslaughts of pagan Huns and Avars were outmatched by the demoniac outbreak of the Muslim Arabs, that the main pressure shifted from the Eurasian front to the Arabian.

Charles de Steuben, Bataille de Poitiers en Octobre 732, Musée du Château de Versailles, Wikimedia Commons

A Study of History, Vol V, OUP, 1939

The Hellenist lobby

Jacket blurb of Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy, Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair, Routledge, 2004. Buy here.

“During the First World War King’s College of the University of London became a leading centre for the study of Russia and Eastern Europe. Its principal, Ronald Burrows, a committed philhellene and devoted admirer of the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, had a particular interest in the promotion of Byzantine and Modern Greek studies. It was Burrows’ enthusiasm, supported by Venizelos, that led to the establishment in 1919 of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature. The endowment for the chair was raised by a group of wealthy Anglo-Greeks, while the Greek government provided an annual subsidy. The 29-year-old historian Arnold Toynbee was chosen as the first incumbent of the chair.

“In 1921 Toynbee, on leave of absence, covered the Greek-Turkish war in Asia Minor for the Manchester Guardian and reported on the atrocities committed by Greek troops. On his return he wrote The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, which appeared in the summer of 1922 shortly before the rout of the Greek forces by the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Toynbee’s writings and his growing sympathy for the Turkish cause enraged the Greek donors of the chair who, grouped in a Subscribers’ Committee, put strong pressure on the college and university authorities. Toynbee also came under fire from an influential group of colleagues. The cumulative furore forced Toynbee to resign from the chair in 1924 at the end of his first five-year term.

“Now the papers of the major protagonists have enabled a detailed reconstruction to be made of the interaction of international and academic politics. The controversy has some contemporary relevance as it touches on fundamental questions of academic freedom and on the problems inherent in the reliance of academic institutions on outside sources of funding.”

Toynbee, apparently, had not known of the existence of the Subscribers’ Committee when he took the chair. Modern parallel: denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, at DePaul University, Chicago, in 2007. Did Toynbee’s views on Israel eventually marginalise him in the US? When did the lobby tighten its grip?

The fifth chapter in McNeill’s biography is about Toynbee’s changing views of near-eastern politics and how events there in the ’20s confirmed him in positions he had taken in the Foreign Office towards the end of the First World War; and about his changing ideas on history before and during the King’s years, and how they were leading him towards the Study. It is hard not to feel some sympathy with the Greeks in the row in which it all culminated. Were they being so unreasonable?

Ancient Greece in the King’s entrance hall (Sophocles by Constantin Dausch, a copy of a Roman copy, the Lateran Sophocles at the Vatican; Sappho by Ferdinand Seeboeck, original; both commissioned by Frida Mond, wife of Ludwig, and passing to King’s on her death in 1923)

 

The end of freshness

“Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

___

John and Doreen Weightman, translators, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Jonathan Cape, 1973; first French edition Librairie Plon, 1955.

The US and the Armenian genocide

On March 4 the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed a resolution describing the killings of Armenians in the First World War as genocide. There had been “joint resolutions” in the House of Representatives in 1975, 1984 and 1996, which had been resisted by the White House. I’m not sure about the Senate or whether the resolutions actually became “joint”.

The same fate presumably awaits this resolution and was the fate of a similar House Committee resolution in 2007.

Obama had used the word without equivocation before he took office, but is unlikely to use it now.

There has been no official US federal recognition of an Armenian genocide.

The countries which have recognised one are listed here, a Wikipedia page which looks as if it was written by Armenians, but quotes sources. They include France, Germany and Italy, but not the UK. Here is the page on Turkish-Armenian relations.

I have avoided using the word here. While there is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were massacred by Turks on Turkish territory, starting in 1915, the debate about how much of the killing was centrally directed may, for all I know, still be justified. Would the word be applicable if there was limited, or superfluous, central direction?

___

The Wikipedia page on the massacres is comprehensive, but quotes mainly from secondary sources. I omit the most of the references in the quotations below.

“While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia, Argentina, and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians ‘died or were massacred during deportation’ in the years 1915-1916.

[...]

“Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification before its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, ‘… the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any scepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question.’ Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.

“Winston Churchill described the massacres as an ‘administrative holocaust’ and noted that ‘the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. [...] [Wikipedia’s bracket.] There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could only be satisfied at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems.’

[...]

“British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose 1916 report remains a critical primary source, changed his evaluation later in life, concluding, ‘These … Armenian political aspirations had not been legitimate. … Their aspirations did not merely threaten to break up the Turkish Empire; they could not be fulfilled without doing grave injustice to the Turkish people itself.’ [Footnote: Quoted in Gunter, Pursuing the Just Cause (1986) p. 16.] [Michael M Gunter, Pursuing the Just Cause of Their People: A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism, Greenwood Press, 1986. I quoted the passage about Armenian aspirations, which appears in Acquaintances (1967), here. But Toynbee does use the word “genocide” in that book.]

“For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is essential to preserving Turkish national unity. The usual Turkish argument is that the deportations were necessary because the Armenians had allied themselves with Russian invaders in wartime, and ‘some 100,000 Armenians … may have died between 1915 and 1918, but this was no greater a percentage than that of the Turks and other Muslims who died as a result of the same conditions in the same places at the same time.’ ‘There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before or during World War I.’ [Footnote: Statements by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, 1982, quoted in Gunter (1986) p. 18.] Dissident historians in Turkey are trying to reclaim the Armenians as part of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of confidence in Turkish national unity.

[...]

“Arnold Toynbee writes that ‘the Young Turks made Pan-Islamism and Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist gaining ground.’ [Footnote: Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, Turkey: A Past and a Future, 1917, pp. 22-3.] Toynbee and various other sources report that many Armenians were spared death by marrying into Turkish families or converting to Islam.”

___

Armenian refugees in Aleppo, 1915, Wikimedia Commons

Revenge on Germany

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

German Africa 2

German Oceania

German China

German Oceania and China

Toynbee was never more prescient than when warning of the dangers of humiliating Germany in a peace settlement after the First World War. I posted a clip a while back from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, where Michael Maloney portrays Toynbee in Versailles in 1919. Toynbee is made to say:

“My fear is that we do not have statesmen with enough courage to resist the public demand for revenge. [Woodrow Wilson] is a ‘fine man’ obsessed with forming his absurd League of Nations and meanwhile he’s giving way to every bloodthirsty demand. He’s completely outwitted. Clemenceau [is] a dinosaur baying for blood, Lloyd George a politician with no vision or morality at all. You can’t just wipe your enemy out. Years ago Rome could just wipe Carthage out, but now the world has changed. These men are trying to force Germany down, but it cannot be done without terrible tragedy. Push Germany down and you’ll pay a price. And one day it will once more rise to the top. But this lot are behaving like men with no memories. Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.”

What lessons exactly? His final words are an echo of George Santayana’s aphorism in his The Life of Reason (5 volumes, 1905-6): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I have no evidence that Toynbee had read Santayana.)

The speech sounds too good to be true as prophecy, but his first book, Nationality and the War, from which I have been quoting, does bear out those views, even more remarkably in that it was written at the start of the war, in late 1914 and early 1915. I’ll quote the passages again at the end of this post.

The spirit of Nationality and the War had been, in McNeill’s words, “that of liberal, upper class Edwardian England, combining a concern for principle with a sublime confidence that enlightened English opinion, and the benevolent interests of the British Empire, would (or at least ought to) prevail.” But the outbreak of that war had already changed his view of history.

One of the failures of McNeill’s book is that he does not track Toynbee’s responses at Versailles to the emerging idea of the League. Perhaps the data does not exist.

In Nationality and the War, Toynbee had written that any future international machinery

cannot encroach upon individual sovereignty in any way that affects, or is deemed to affect, the sovereign right of self-preservation: in particular, it cannot aspire to the regulation of War, and it is waste of ingenuity to propound any international machinery for this purpose. The best-conceived arbitration or conciliation is bound to break down, when once a sovereign state has made up its mind that the surrender of its will on a particular issue is equivalent to annihilation. No international authority could ever prevent parleys like those of last July from resolving themselves into a conflict of arms.

Of Woodrow Wilson he says only:

President Wilson has offered Europe the good offices of the United States for mediation at the close of this war and for devising arrangements that shall prevent war for the future. Europe would do well to take President Wilson at his word, and ask the United States to give her permanent assistance of a very practical kind [...]. The proposition would doubtless come to American public opinion as a shock, for it has been a constant maxim of their foreign policy to incur no political obligations across the Atlantic, and they will be more eager than ever to maintain this principle, now that they have seen what volcanoes underlie Europe’s smiling surface.

Clemenceau and Lloyd George are not mentioned. What sources, other than that book, could the Indiana Jones programme-makers have used when putting those words into his mouth? They will hardly have gone to archives. McNeill’s biography is more helpful here than Toynbee’s autobiographical Experiences and Acquaintances. They may have used other published memoirs, or histories of the conference. Toynbee’s contribution, The Non-Arab Territories of the Ottoman Empire since the Armistice of the 30th October, 1918, in HWV Temperley, editor, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol 6, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1924, might shed light on his feelings in early 1919.

The autobiographical volumes say nothing important about his attitude to Clemenceau and nothing that shows a particularly hostile attitude to Lloyd George (but see this post). In Acquaintances he calls Wilson’s “psychic radar” “inadequate”. In Experiences he says that Wilson,

concentrating on saving as many Yugoslavs as he could from Italy’s clutches, threw German-speaking South Tyrol to the Italian wolves. [...] This was one of the most inexcusable of the violations of the principle of self-determination in the 1919 peace settlement.

The Study is critical of Wilson. He regards him as not up to the peace-making job. McNeill quotes a letter from Toynbee to his mother dated November 12 1916:

I hope and sometimes dare believe, Wilson will be mediating between us this time next year.

But this is the only reference to Wilson in the book. He makes his antagonism against Lloyd George clearer. The gist, according to McNeill, is that in April 1919 Lloyd George had disregarded his and Harold Nicolson’s (Nicholson according to McNeill) advice in a memorandum to “cleave” Europe from Asia, give Greece Constantinople and the European shores of the Straits and the Sea of Marmara, but give Turkey the whole of Anatolia and its shores. They were opposing the then-prevailing British and American views, which involved giving new-fangled League of Nations mandates to the US for an “independent” Armenia and also for Constantinople and its “adjacent region”, which presumably included a large part of Anatolia. Here we do have a sign of feeling against the League. You might have thought that he would favour any device that would protect the Armenians, after his championing of their cause in 1915.

This rejection is part of a narrative of failure which McNeill is keen to establish as one of the themes of his biography. Of course, Toynbee’s ideas later became even more pro-Turkish, and when Lloyd George got into trouble over the enforcement of the Treaty of Sèvres, he could not help gloating at his discomfiture. His views got him into trouble when he took a sabbatical from his Greek-funded professorship at London University to become a war correspondent in Turkey, and in 1924 they led to his retreat to Chatham House. They were partly a reaction against his early anti-Turkish writings.

In Nationality and the War he had felt that Smyrna was “marked out to be the capital of a diminished Turkey”. The book was, of course, premature. Many people felt that the war would end soon. That makes it interesting: we can look at each of Toynbee’s ideas and compare them with what actually happened, as I’ve been doing in recent posts in a few areas.

Lloyd George’s rejection of his advice, McNeill suggests, “spelled failure” for his effort to justify his personal role in the war. He had evaded the draft on what seem to have been spurious medical grounds and a feeling of guilt seems to have stayed with him. His whole life’s work was a kind of expiation. He comes close to saying as much, while maintaining that he had been spared from service by a medical accident.

McNeill’s suggestion is believable in emotional terms, but really needs more than the rejection of a single memorandum to support it. He has, however, described previous clashes and tensions with old Foreign Office hands and military intelligence officers in the Foreign Office in London.

McNeill writes of his “growing radicalism [in 1918] and dismay at a social system that could provoke and sustain such a war”. He joined the Labour Party. We are not told in what month. Letter to his mother, no date, probably July 1918 from Castle Howard (aka Brideshead):

I find myself inclining steadily towards the social revolution. The middle class have had their fling for a century and produced this [war]; now let the working class have their try. I am for nationality at one end and internationalism at the other, as essential parts of reconstruction, and if existing states and their traditions cannot square with them, let them go to the devil, the United Kingdom and the Dual Monarchy and all of them.

Post-Second World War communists in western Europe would echo the second sentence more esoterically and substitute “bourgeoisie” for “middle class”.

Virginia Woolf, patronising as usual in her diary, January 1918, quoted by McNeill: “Arnold outdid me in anti-nationalism, anti-patriotism, and anti-militarism. … I like her [Rosalind] better than Arnold, who improves though, and is evidently harmless, and much in his element when discussing Oxford. He hasn’t much good to say of it and will never go back. … He knew the aristocratic heroes who are now all killed and celebrated, and loathed them; for one reason they must have thought him a pale blooded little animal. But he described their row and their violence and their quick snapping brains, always winning scholarships and bullying and … admitting no one to their set.” He never did return to academic tenure at Oxford. Who were those aristocratic heroes?

McNeill: “Having failed to ‘do his part’ in the war by enlisting in the army, he justified his personal behavior by condemning the criminal folly of war more violently than he might otherwise have done.”

The severity of the burden which reparations imposed is disputed, but Hitler consciously played on resentment of the Treaty as he rose to power. In Acquaintances, Toynbee writes of Smuts that

he has [...] been charged with being the main inventor of the ingenious devices by which the terms of the reparations chapter of the Treaty of Versailles were kept within the letter of the “no indemnities” stipulation in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points (to which the governments of the Western allies had committed themselves in the armistice agreement), while the spirit of the President’s stipulation was being flagrantly violated. [...] The morally unwarrantable inflation of the reparations bill was a breach of faith; and, for a statesman of Smuts’s standing, to advise that the fraudulent act was legally allowable was tantamount to recommending it and incurring responsibility for it.

Presumably the “no indemnities” stipulation was the third Point, which asked for “The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance”. There was, in effect, no equality of trade conditions for Germany and serious economic barriers were erected against her.

Paul Johnson called Toynbee “early League of Nations man” with some justification (The Times, July 15 1976). The tone of the first two volumes of the Survey of International Affairs is pro-League. The man behind the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Lionel Curtis, wanted to jettison the British Empire in its old form and substitute a free British Imperial Federation, or Commonwealth, of dominions, in alliance with the US, as the driving force in a new world order. What was his attitude to the League? The US, despite having formulated the concept and signed the Covenant, never joined the League of Nations. Toynbee seems to have embraced an idea of “world government”, all the vaguer for being free of Curtis’s ideas about the Commonwealth, after 1945, as the only alternative to mass-suicide in the Atomic Age, having, like almost everybody, become disillusioned with the League in the ’30s.

Curtis chaired a meeting for a group of British and American delegates at Versailles on May 30 1919 at the Hotel Majestic, the headquarters of the British and Dominions delegation, at which he proposed the idea of an Anglo-American institute of foreign affairs to study international problems with a view to preventing future wars. In the event, the British Institute of International Affairs was founded in London in July 1920, with Curtis as its joint Honorary Secretary, with GM Gathorne-Hardy, and received its Royal Charter in 1926. The Council on Foreign Relations, which had its own partially separate antecedents, was founded in 1922 in New York.

What influence did Curtis’s views have on Toynbee when they were in Versailles? If Toynbee found the idea of the League “absurd” for a time, did that reflect a phase of Curtis’s thinking? McNeill does not tell us exactly when Toynbee left Paris, but it seems to have been in April. This is confirmed by Toynbee in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey. Yet Chatham House’s book, Chatham House, Its History and Inhabitants, CE Carrington, revised and updated by Mary Bone, Chatham House, 2004, having given the May 30 date, publishes part of a letter from Toynbee to a Miss Cleeve, presumably of Chatham House, dated October 15 1958, in which he recollects an evening at the Majestic, with “L.C.” holding the floor, at which “the Institute was launched”. He tells a similar story, again with no date for the meeting, in Experiences, though not in Acquaintances, which has a whole chapter on Curtis. Neither account mentions the presence of Americans. McNeill certainly has Toynbee in England, and in a state of mental collapse, on May 30.

He recognised, in Experiences, that the League

did effectively intervene to prevent the inter-war Polish Government from evicting German agricultural colonists in Posnan (Posen) who had been planted, before the First World War, on lands in this Polish territory that had been expropriated by the Prussian Government, while Posen was still Prussian territory, as part of a policy of Germanization. This policy had been indefensible; yet, in the inter-war period, the League of Nations rightly held that the indefensible circumstances in which the German settlers had acquired their farms in Posnan did not justify their now being evicted from these, however unjustifiable their installation in them might have been. Eviction on political grounds was rightly held to be inadmissible, even in unusually provocative circumstances.

The first big lapse from the observance of this principle was the compulsory exchange of minority populations and their property as between [...] Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria after the débâcle of the Greek army in Anatolia in the Graeco-Turkish war after the end of the First World War.

No such humanity as the League insisted upon in inter-war Poland was shown by the Russians towards Germans in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War, whose numbers, received in West Germany, were

approximately equal to the number of European Jews murdered, during that war, by the Nazis.

In 1931 Japan invaded China in violation of the Covenant of the League, and of the Washington Treaty and the Kellogg Pact. The League did nothing. Hardly surprisingly, without America.

In 1935-6 Britain and France refused to support the League when Italy attacked Ethiopia.

The whole thing is so infantile, as well as so evil, that it makes me sick to think about it. [Letter to Veronica Boulter, April 17 1936, quoted by McNeill.]

But he continued, at least until Munich, to believe that some kind of accommodation with Germany was possible, and some of his views during this period, and a visit to Hitler in early 1936, just before the reoccupation of the Rhineland, caused some to think of him as an appeaser.

His disillusionment confirmed his belief that

the principal cause of war in our world today is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities or States. [...] People will sacrifice themselves for the ‘Third Reich’ or whatever the Ersatz-Götzen [“substitute Gods”; Götz is a diminutive] may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God.” [Letter to the Manchester Guardian published on April 9 1935, quoted by McNeill.]

The posts listed at the top take us through the beginning of the second chapter of Nationality and the War. The chapter is called Prussianism, or Germany’s Ambitions. A sketch of German history led into a description of Prussianism and of the German overseas Empire. He recommended that, in accordance with a generally fair treatment of Germany after the war and respect for her commercial and industrial interests, Germany should be given back her African colonies. But the German colonies were a peripheral matter. After a concluding passage to the first section, which I will quote in a moment, he goes on to discuss how Germany should be treated in Europe. The first section is called The German Empire. The four subsequent sections of the chapter are called The French Frontier, The Danish Frontier, The Polish Frontier and Prussian State and German Nation.

McNeill summarises his recommendations: “Treating Germany well meant partitioning the Hapsburg monarchy and allowing Austria and Bohemia to unite with Germany, while also shearing off portions of Alsace and Lorraine in the west and some Polish lands in the east, all in accordance with local opinion as indicated by plebiscites. Such a peace settlement would make Germany supreme on the continent of Europe, but that did not bother Toynbee since a generous settlement in accord with the principle of nationality might be expected to convert the Germans and other Europeans from ‘national competition’ to ‘national cooperation,’ particularly in view of the threat from China that he anticipated.” I will post the arguments in full in due course.

Great Britain’s true policy, then, is to allow Germany to retain all openings for peaceable, as opposed to forcible, expansion afforded her by her oversea dominions as they existed before this war broke out, and we shall have a particularly free hand in the decision of this question, because the command of the sea, and the world-wide naval operations it makes possible, fall almost entirely within our province, and not within that of our European allies. We must furthermore give just as great facilities as before to German immigration through all the vast portions of our empire that are still only in process of being opened up and settled, and we must urge our allies to adopt the same principle with regard to the territories in a similar phase of development which acknowledge their sovereignty. We must also respect the concessions which German enterprise has secured for its capital, with such fine initiative and perseverance, in neutral countries of backward growth. We shall find instances, similar to the coaling stations in the Pacific, where professedly economic concerns have an essentially political intention – certain sections of the projected Bagdad (sic) railway occur at once to our minds – and here we may be compelled to require Germany to abandon her title; but we must confine such demands to a minimum. Both we and our allies must take care that neither political panic nor economic greed induces us to carry them to excess, and in every case where we decide to make them, we must give Germany the opportunity of acquiring, in compensation, more than their equivalent in economic value.

If we meet Germany in this spirit, she will at least emerge from the war no more cramped and constricted than she entered it. This will not, of course, satisfy her ambitions, for they were evil ambitions, and could not be satisfied without the world’s ruin; but it will surely allay her fears. She will have seen that we had it in our power to mutilate her all round and cripple her utterly, and that we held our hand. Once her fear is banished, we can proceed to conjure away her envy: for to leave her what she has already would prepare the ground for an invitation to join us in organising some standing international authority that should continuously adjust the claims of all growing nations, Germany among the rest, by reasonable methods of compromise, and so provide openings for the respective expansion of their wealth and population.

Such an international organ would replace the struggle for existence between nations, in which each tries to snatch his neighbour’s last crust, by a co-operation in which all would work together for a common end; but many tangled problems strew the ground in front of us, before we can clear it for such a construction. The national foundations of Europe must first be relaid; and just as in the question of territories over sea the decisive word will lie with ourselves, so in the case of European frontiers it will lie with our allies, because the war on land is their province and because the national problems at issue affect them even more directly than us.

This does not absolve us from the duty of probing these problems to their bottom: rather it makes it the more imperative that we should do so, inasmuch as our influence upon their solution will depend principally on the impartiality of our point of view and the reasonableness of our suggestions, and very little on any power of making our will prevail by mere intransigeance (sic), or by the plea of paramount interests. Great Britain ought to come to the conference with very definite opinions about the details of these problems, even at the risk of annoying her allies by the appearance of meddling with what is less her business than theirs. The Allies have proclaimed to the world that they will wage this war to its conclusion in concert, and that declaration will not be difficult for them to observe: but they have also implied that they will negotiate in concert the terms of peace, and it is here that the separateness of their positive interests, beyond the negative bond of self-preservation, will be in danger of manifesting itself. They have morally pledged themselves to a settlement that shall subordinate their several, and even their collective, interests to the general interests of the civilised world, and it is on this ground that they have claimed the sympathy of neutrals in the struggle with their opponents. To fulfil their promise, they will need all the wisdom, patience and disinterestedness that they can command; and the supreme value of Great Britain’s voice will lie in the proposal of formulas calculated to reconcile the views of the Allies with each other and also with the relatively impartial standpoint of the non-nationalistic element that happily obtains some footing in all countries and in all strata of society.

The solutions we offer, then, for the national problems of Europe must not be conceived as demands which it is in Great Britain’s vital interest to propound and in her absolute power to enforce, but rather as suggestions compatible with British interests, and capable of acceptance by our allies. The satisfaction of all parties on whom their translation into fact will depend, is, however, only a negative condition: they must further be governed by the positive aim of dealing impartial justice to ourselves, our friends and our enemies alike. We must follow the principle that a “disinterested” policy ultimately serves the truest interest of its authors.

The first problem that confronts us is that of the alien nationalities included against their will within the present frontiers of the German Empire. The settlement after this war must bring justice to these populations by affording them an opportunity for choosing freely whether they will maintain their connection with Germany or no, and if not, what destiny they prefer. When we have estimated the probable results of their choice, we may proceed to consider what the effect is likely to be on German public opinion, and look for some means of cancelling the bitterness which cannot fail to be aroused in some degree. But this is essentially a secondary consideration. We have accepted the principle that the recognition of nationality is the necessary foundation for European peace; and peace is endangered far more by the unjust violation of the national idea than by the resentment due to the just reversal of the injustice, even if the wrongdoer be the most potent factor in Europe and his victim the most insignificant. We will proceed, therefore, to consider in turn the national problems within the German Empire on their own merits.

That concludes the first section of the second chapter of Nationality and the War. Here is a passage from the first chapter, which is called The Future.

[War] rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt her more – to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it; but the civilised man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The “hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to bann (sic) is the possibility of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never rest till she has “redeemed her honour,” by humiliating us more cruelly in turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent, for the blood feud grows by geometrical progression, the very freedom for which we are now giving our lives.

Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plough, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ [Footnote: The song of Hybrias the Kretan.] If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat our ploughshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilised garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.”

The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilised countries as war is an abnormal occupation for civilised men. We saw the effect of the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.

It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a civilised man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows (supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows from the plainsman who cannot make reprisals.

If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers have been diverted en masse from their prospering industry to conquer the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is jeopardised by the change of method.

Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at least no worse for the transit. Civilised wealth perishes on the way. Our economic organisation owes its power and range to the marvellous forethought and co-operation that has built it up; but the most delicate organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether England or Germany, will have to realise that, though he may seem to have got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.

The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international. Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political future – the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest, would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.

But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation” is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralysing German intellect and art, and European civilisation, if it is to go on growing, cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist, engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realises the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable human losses.

With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly, and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby, the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the fact that war itself is the evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of the whole world.

This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State”.

Here again are the passages in the second chapter in which he asks for lenient treatment of Germany in a post-war settlement.

Our ultimate object is to prevent war for the future, and the essential means to this end is to convince Germany that war is not to her interest. We and the French disbelieve in war already, but a minority of one can make a quarrel, in spite of the proverb. The only way to convince Germany is first to beat her badly and then to treat her well.

If we humiliate her, we shall strengthen the obsolete ideas in her consciousness more than ever – perhaps no longer the idea of “Plunder,” but certainly that of “Revenge,” which is much worse: if we deal “disinterestedly” with her (though it will be in our own truest interest) we may produce such a reaction of public opinion in Germany, that the curse of aggressive militarism will be exorcised from her as effectively in 1914, as the curse of political paralysis was exorcised in 1870.

“First to beat her badly and then to treat her well.” This was the approach of the Western allies, in relation to Japan as well as to Germany, after 1945.

One thing is clear: whether Germany’s feeling of constriction has good grounds or not, we must avoid deliberately furnishing it with further justification than it has already. It would be possible to maintain that the colonies and concessions Germany has already acquired give her room for expansion ample enough to deprive her of excuse for her envy, not to speak of the conduct by which she has attempted to satisfy it; but even this view would be rash in face of Germany’s vehement conviction to the contrary. Germany is likely to judge her own plight more truly than we can, and even if she has judged wrongly, her opinion is more important for our purpose than the objective truth. To give the lie to this national belief by taking from her even that which she hath, would be the surest means of deepening and perpetuating her national bitterness.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Experiences, OUP, 1969

William H McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

This was a Depression, not Crash, song, but it will do to mark the anniversary.

The market slid on Thursday October 24 1929, but the catastrophic collapse occurred on Monday and Tuesday, October 28 and 29.

The song was written in 1931. The lyrics were by Yip Harburg, the music by Jay Gorney.

Here sung by the little-known Charlie Palloy, with guitar and his orchestra, recorded in 1932. He gets the song’s grim tread better than its better-known exponent, Bing Crosby.

Bing Crosby. I’m not sure of the date.

Europe and Asia

“Europe” and “Asia” are conventions which are only possible on a small-scale two-colour map. The scientific physical geographer knows of no barrier between the two continents. In the tundra-zone or the forest-zone or the steppe-zone, where is the division? Or at what point does one pass out of Europe into Asia along the Trans-Siberian or the Trans-Turkestan Railway? What are the political frontiers between Russia or Turkey “in Europe” and Russia or Turkey “in Asia”? The boundary between the continents, which bisects their city, does not disturb the inhabitants of Constantinople, many of whom sleep in Asiatic houses and earn their daily bread in European offices, with a penny-steamer to take them to and fro. Again, when one comes to the Aegean, one finds no boundary there. The European mountain ranges which dip under the sea at Athos and Sunium raise their crests above the waves in chains of islands, and reach over into Asia from the [Anatolian] peninsulas of Cheshmé and Mykáli and Knidos. The physiographical unity of the Aegean basin, without distinction of continents, is the strongest point in the claim advanced by Greece to Smyrna, and what is true of the Aegean holds on a larger scale for the entire Mediterranean. The traditional partition of Eurasia into two continents is unreal, and the Ancient Greek scientists who first introduced it as a parochial division in their miniature world, never succumbed to the illusion that there was some mysterious difference of soil or climate predisposing “Asiatics” to vice and “Europeans” to virtue. After giving full weight to the environmental factor, they concluded that the human differences which were so striking in their own day, were functions not of continents but of cultures, and they attributed most importance to the political dissimilarities between Hellenic and Ancient Middle Eastern society.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

Wells’s Outline – A thronging, amazing Paris

“In 1919, Paris was the capital of the world.” Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers, The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, John Murray, 2001.

Below, HG Wells’s Outline of History on Paris in 1919.

Wells, as an older contemporary of Toynbee, wanders into this blog occasionally. But why was the Outline, large parts of which were, as he admitted, cobbled together from the Encyclopædia Britannica, taken so seriously in its time?

It was published as a serial in soft covers in 1919, with colour plates and black-and-white photographs, and drawings and maps by JF Horrabin. The first hard cover book edition appeared in two volumes in 1920, reproducing or imitating the large-page format. The book one sees more often, which endured, was a monochrome single-volume blockbuster with no photographs, but with Horrabin’s drawings and maps.

Wells revised and updated the book more than once. After his death, Raymond Postgate and HG’s son GP Wells took the story up to 1963. The last print edition was in 1971.

What value does the Outline have now? None really, except as ’flu reading, though some passages, including those on Versailles, are vintage Wells (I have quoted another on Versailles here). It’s an otherwise intellectually unsatisfying work, a thousand times superseded. Some saw its limitations at the time, but nearly all agreed that it was a wonderful achievement.

Wells had prestige. There was a hunger for a “synoptic view of world affairs” after the war. But, as I have suggested, it impressed partly because the idea of a world history, strange as this now sounds, was new. There had been ancient and medieval precedents, and a few recent multi-volume syndicated encyclopædic efforts (such as The Historians’ History of the World) in a format which the original, serialised Outline itself partly followed, but nothing by a serious modern figure, pace Ranke and Burckhardt.

Soon, there were imitators. Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind was particularly popular, not only with children. Spengler’s Decline of the West, very different, had appeared in Germany in 1918.

Edward Shanks’s review of the Outline in The London Mercury is reprinted in Patrick Parrinder, editor, HG Wells, The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

Forster wrote at least three critical articles about it (they are reprinted in The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, André Deutsch, 1998).

Catholics objected. Chesterton wrote a book, The Everlasting Man, to refute its world view. “I do not believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades away into nature, or civilization merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short, I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines.”

Belloc wrote A Companion to Mr Wells’s “Outline of History”. Wells replied with Mr Belloc Objects. Belloc replied with Mr Belloc Still Objects.

Toynbee referred to it in the Study.

Nehru’s Glimpses of World History (I mentioned it here) was a kind of Asian riposte to it. This is an enchanting book, even though, or because, written for a child, his daughter Indira (Gandhi). Somebody offered it in a Sunday newspaper list recently as among the unjustly forgotten books. I’ll second that. I’d rather have it on a desert island than the Wells. Its maps were done by Wells’s illustrator, JF Horrabin.

Virginia Woolf referred to the Wells in Between the Acts.

There was more.

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Wells on Versailles and Paris in 1919, mainly relying on a quotation:

“As the heads of the principal Governments implicitly claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race, and endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the people’s organs in the Press. Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson being excepted. … [Footnote: Dillon. And see his The Peace Conference, chapter iii, for instances of the amazing ignorance of various delegates.]

“The restriction upon our space in this Outline will not allow us to tell here how the Peace Conference shrank from a Council of Ten to a Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando), and how it became a conference less and less like a frank and open discussion of the future of mankind, and more and more like some old-fashioned diplomatic conspiracy. Great and wonderful had been the hopes that had gathered to Paris. ‘The Paris of the Conference,’ says Dr. Dillon, ‘ceased to be the capital of France. It became a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow.

‘An Arabian Nights’ touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan (sic), Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz – men with patriarchal beards and scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand and Bokhara. Turbans and fezes, sugar-loaf hats and head-gear resembling episcopal mitres, old military uniforms devised for the embryonic armies of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowywhite burnouses, flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the Roman toga, contributed to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in the city where the grimmest of realities were being faced and coped with.

‘Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise, and the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia, India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal mines, pilgrims, fanatics and charlatans from all climes, priests of all religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes, field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up and pullers-down. All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast. Every day, in my walks, in my apartment, or at restaurants, I met emissaries from lands and peoples whose very names had seldom been heard of before in the West. A delegation from the Pont-Euxine Greeks called on me, and discoursed of their ancient cities of Trebizond, Samsoun, Tripoli, Kerassund, in which I resided many years ago, and informed me that they, too, desired to become welded into an independent Greek Republic, and had come to have their claims allowed. The Albanians were represented by my old friend Turkhan Pasha, on the one hand, and by my friend Essad Pasha on the other – the former desirous of Italy’s protection, the latter demanding complete independence. Chinamen, Japanese, Koreans, Hindus, Kirghizes, Lesghiens, Circassians, Mingrelians, Buryats, Malays, and Negroes and Negroids from Africa and America were among the tribes and tongues foregathered in Paris to watch the rebuilding of the political world system and to see where they “came in.” …’

“To this thronging, amazing Paris, agape for a new world, came President Wilson, and found its gathering forces dominated by a personality narrower, in every way more limited and beyond comparison more forcible than himself: the French Premier, M. Clemenceau. At, the instance of President Wilson, M. Clemenceau was elected President of the Conference. ‘It was,’ said President Wilson, ‘a special tribute to the sufferings and sacrifices of France.’ And that, unhappily, sounded the keynote of the Conference, whose sole business should have been with the future of mankind.”

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The “Council of Ten” contained the heads of government and foreign ministers of Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan.

The months of the conference were those of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, of the foundation of the Fascist party in Italy, of the Bavarian and Hungarian Socialist Republics, of the Amritsar massacre in India, of convulsions in Ireland, Egypt, eastern Europe and Russia, Turkey, Korea and China.

Arrival of jazz in France. In painting and a vein of “classical” music, the eve of a return to form and order.

Paris would remain the centre of the Western art world for another twenty years. Then its decline would be as steep as that of Vienna’s in music.

Parisian throngs not embroiled in war or revolution: La comédie humaine … Les enfants du paradis … La bohème, Act II … Louise, Act II …

Versailles 1919 (post here)

William Orpen, The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, London, Imperial War Museum

The Araxes

Herodotus’s accurate knowledge of geography did not extend much farther eastwards than a line drawn from Trebizond [Trabzon] to Susa [the nearest town on the map below is Ahvāz] (i.e. a line roughly coincident with the present eastern frontiers of Turkey and ‘Irāq); and his “River Araxes” [...] appears to be a conflation of the actual river, still bearing that name [or that of Aras: see the Wikipedia article for its present geopolitical course], which flows from Armenia through Azerbaijan into the Caspian, with the actual Oxus and Jaxartes, into a single mighty and fabulous stream.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934 (footnote)

Over Istanbul

Taken in the early evening a couple of days ago. With an iPhone, so quality unexceptional (but the image will be sharper when enlarged).

Looking roughly north: the Sultan Ahmed (Sultanahmet) Mosque (or Blue Mosque, from tiles in the interior); beyond it, Hagia Sophia. Islam and Christendom.

On the right, the southern end of the Bosphorus just before the Sea of Marmara, which is off the picture to the south.

On the left, the inlet called the Golden Horn.

The land on the other side of the Bosphorus is Asia. Everything else is Europe. The European promontory here is the heart of old Byzantium and Constantinople, the district now called Eminönü. The European merchant colonies were on the opposite side of the Golden Horn, which used to be called Pera and is now called Beyoğlu.

The opposite direction (this was actually taken a few minutes earlier): Hagia Sophia, then Sultan Ahmed, looking across to the Sea of Marmara.

Richard’s comment after the Hagia Sophia post mentions another sight of Istanbul: the cast-iron church of the Bulgarian exarchs.

Hagia Sophia

Scaffolding as a shaft of light. Taken with an iPhone, so not the best resolution. Click to enlarge. Some comments below.

The first church, the Megálē Ekklēsíā, Magna Ecclesia, on the site of a pagan temple, was inaugurated by Constantius II in 360. It burned down during riots in 404. The second was inaugurated by Theodosius II in 405. It, in turn, was burnt, in 532 under Justinian, during the Nika Revolt. Justinian built a third, much larger basilica, which was inaugurated in 537: α Σοφία, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Sancta Sapientia, Sancta Sophia. Did the previous church have these names?

Justinian’s basilica was the largest church in Christendom until the completion of the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede in Seville in 1520. Its dome was the largest masonry dome until Brunelleschi’s in Florence. The dome of the Roman Pantheon is still the largest concrete dome. The Pantheon dome, the Duomo dome and the dome of St Peter’s have roughly the same diameter, and all three are larger than Hagia Sophia. The Hagia Sophia dome has been repaired often and was rebuilt, not in exactly the same way, immediately after an earthquake in 558.

The Turks turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and in 1935 Atatürk turned it into a museum, desanctifying it. It inspired many Ottoman architects, notably Sinan, who built the Sultan Ahmed or Blue Mosque, which stands opposite.

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These pictures were taken on October 29, Republic Day, the day after I arrived here. Apart from a mad trip to Trabzon from Georgia in 1997, I don’t think I’d been in Turkey since 1990, when I was told in a café by the Sea of Marmara, by a Kurd who was reading Hürriyet, that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. My hotel room didn’t have a television.

Istanbul hasn’t changed that much superficially, but I miss the blue fragrant haze from Turkish tobacco, smell of sweat and tang of wood-smoke from chimneys.

Exterior view, Wikimedia Commons

Arriving in Constantinople

The Turks arrived physically in Constantinople 555 years ago, but a documentary (BBC Radio 3, October 19, nla) presented by Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London, broadcast before the opening of the new Royal Academy Byzantine exhibition, suggested that they are arriving now.

Toynbee was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine Language Literature and History at King’s College from 1919 to ’24.

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“With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Christianity lost its last foothold in the east Mediterranean. The Byzantines became part of the Muslim world, their new rulers neglected its Christian past, and the call to prayer replaced the tolling of Christian bells. I talked about this neglect to John Freely, who’s lived in Istanbul since 1960 and has written many books about it, including Strolling through Istanbul and Istanbul, The Imperial City.

“‘Byzantium gets left out of Western history – and of course you don’t quite know that some of those minarets are coming up from places like Hagia Sophia that were Byzantine churches. You have to discover it on your own to know that the Byzantine city is still here. The interesting thing is the tremendous research and interest in Byzantium on the academic level by young people who are not the élite in Turkey – I know the son of a carpenter and the son of a day labourer who are now doing Byzantine archaeology. There is a grassroots interest in Byzantium which is springing up without any pressure from the outside liberals. It’s extraordinary.’”

Herrin points out that that would be a change in Turkey. The Turkish state and official hierarchy has had great difficulty in dealing with its Christian past. Freely:

“‘We see things that are happening despite the state and despite the attitudes and despite nationalism. Turkey is really discovering what it is on a national level in an astonishing way that isn’t hitting the press at all. Suddenly it’s terribly curious about the outside world. [Turks] heard about Byzantium on their courses and got the usual story, but they are interested in finding out more. This curiosity that was so circumscribed before is now not any more: it’s quite open, and so they’ll take the natural course that young curious people will do. They have access now to universities. Our maid’s two children have graduated, every taxi driver I take over the age of forty has got children going to university. Byzantium is one thing that people are interested in because it’s here, in front of them – not only here, but all over Anatolia, and they are very curious about who came before them.’”

Other countries and cultures also claim a Byzantine heritage, insist on their descent from medieval Constantinople. Now this heritage is being claimed by the Turks. Herrin introduces Nevra Necipoğlu, Professor of Byzantine History at Bosphorus (Boğaziçi) University.

“‘I have been teaching at in Istanbul since 1990, and when I first started to teach in the history department as a Byzantinist, I encountered some problems because there were some people who thought that the study of the Byzantine empire was not an appropriate subject, and at least it should not be named: the courses should not carry the name Byzantine Empire. One reason is of course the problem of the required languages. Ancient Greek is not a language that is easy to learn in Turkey, or Latin. As a matter of fact, the study of classical languages or classics departments has not been a well-established part of Turkey’s educational past. As far as Byzantine studies go, it has a relatively short history. We can go back to the 1940s when at Istanbul university for the first time Sir Steven Runciman had been invited to give lectures on Byzantium. At the beginning there were no native Turks to do that. A second very important reason is of course the ideological problem, because until recently for many Turkish people the Byzantine civilization and the Byzantine past was not considered to be part of their own cultural heritage. And so Byzantine history is regarded as part of the Greek past and not really part of the Turkish past. While I was a graduate student studying Byzantine history, people used to ask me: Why are you not studying Turkish history?, and I said, Well, this is part of our cultural heritage as well, and it should be studied and learned and encouraged in Turkey.’

“Murat Belge is one of the leading intellectuals of Istanbul and author of many books on Ottoman civilization, Turkish literature and contemporary politics.

“‘Westerners throughout Ottoman history made us feel that we were living on lands that did not belong to us, that belong by right to Christendom, and of course this got under the skin of people. Memories last long and behaviour is not always activated by rational motivations. We are living in a more rational age, and I don’t think it really makes sense to carry on with these fears all this time. To get interested in whatever we can talk about, there has to some channel from that object to your mind, and when these channels are blocked because of all these prejudices, offensive or defensive or whatever, then of course you cannot arouse interest. When you don’t know, you don’t love. You can love what you know, you can only hate what you don’t know. So these channels should be open. It’s not the case that Turkish people are not interested or they dislike Byzantine issues, they are not informed and there is not enough excitement. There are surprising continuities. The whole administrative know-how. There really is a lot inherited from Byzantine tradition into Ottoman and I would even go so far as to ask a question: Who is the true follower of Byzantium, Greeks or Turks? And then give the answer, well, in many ways the Turks. Even the way we articulated the religious branch in the state apparatus was directly taken from the Byzantine tradition, so in those areas we are the true children of Byzantium, and the poor Greeks in Attica and the Peloponnesus had nothing to do with all this.’”

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The early Turkish nationalists had sought an identity in some Turanian hinterland, or in an Anatolia-based Turkishness, or in Islam.

The claims of some modern Egyptians and Greeks to be the heirs of ancient are sometimes scorned. The less continuity, the more absurd the pretension.

Hitler’s and Mussolini’s historical ideas, the Showa Emperor’s claim at the “2,600th” anniversary celebrations of the Empire in Tokyo in 1940 to have been the heir of the first emperor, Shah Reza’s at the “2,500th” anniversary ceremonies at the ruins of Persepolis in 1971 to have been the successor of the Achaemenidae, Saddam Hussein’s in the ’80s and ’90s to have been the heir of the Babylonians, were state-sponsored fantasies. There’s an obvious difference between them and the conscious desire of ordinary people to identify themselves with, partially or wholly assimilate themselves to, the historic culture of the place in which they happen to live whatever the cultural discontinuity. Otherwise no British Muslim citizen of Pakistani origin could choose to think of himself as British or English or Welsh or Scottish. And Freely says that the Turkish rapprochement is happening in defiance of the state.

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Freely says that Byzantium gets left out of Western history. Does he mean history as taught only in Turkey, or as taught in the West as well?

Toynbee refers here to the way history was taught in Britain in 1897, but he could be writing about how it is taught at an elementary level today.

The picture [of history] presented [in England] in 1897 had also excluded three out of the four main branches of Christianity itself, namely Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, though in 1897 the number of adherents of the churches in the Eastern Orthodox communion was of the same order of magnitude as the number, at that date, of Protestants and Catholics.

[...]

The Greeks had been excluded [from history] as from the year A.D. 451, the date in which the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon had been drafted by Christian Greek theologians. (The Greeks had been re-admitted as from 1821, because in that year they had revolted from the Ottoman Empire with the intention of seeking admission to membership in the Western society.)

The treatment of the history of the Roman Empire in the fifth century of the Christian Era had been the most bizarre of all. In that century the Roman Empire had survived in the Levant, which had always been its demographic and economic centre of gravity, but it had collapsed in its relatively backward western provinces. Yet, as from the year A.D. 476, in which the last of the impotent Roman Emperors in the western part of the Empire had been deposed, the chart of the course of history that was current in 1897 ignored the Roman Empire, though, in the Levant, the Empire was still a going concern, and though it continued to play a major part in human affairs till the close of the twelfth century.

Not Broadway at the turn of the nineteenth century, but a recent photograph of İstiklal Caddesi, Beyoğlu, Istanbul

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

The shadow of the West

Savages are distressed at the waning of the moon and attempt to counteract it by magical remedies. They do not realise that the shadow which creeps forward till it blots out all but a fragment of the shining disc, is cast by their world. In much the same way we civilised people of the West glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western contemporaries lying under the shadow of some stronger power, which seems to paralyse their energies by depriving them of light. Generally we are too deeply engrossed in our own business to look closer, and we pass by on the other side – conjecturing (if our curiosity is sufficiently aroused to demand an explanation) that the shadow which oppresses these sickly forms is the ghost of their own past. Yet if we paused to examine that dim gigantic overshadowing figure standing, apparently unconscious, with its back to its victims, we should be startled to find that its features are ours.

The West had long demonised the Turks. Toynbee, who had himself, during the First World War, written anti-Turkish propaganda, examined the effect of Western policies and actions on post-1918 Turkey in

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

Greek prisons at Smyrna

The Allies which had defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First World War intended to carve up Anatolia into zones of influence and offered the western regions of Turkey to Greece under the Treaty of Sèvres. On May 15 1919 the Greek Army occupied Smyrna (İzmir), but the Greek expedition which was sent into central Anatolia, with the intention of taking Ankara, turned into a disaster for both the Anatolians and the Greeks of Turkey. The Turkish Army retook Smyrna on September 9 1922, ending the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22. Part of the Greek population of the city, together with the departing Greek troops, fled to nearby Greek islands. The rest left under the ensuing 1923 agreement for the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, which was part of the Lausanne Treaty. It may have been departing Greeks who started the Great Fire that broke out in Smyrna on September 13 1922.

In Athens on August 14 1921, Toynbee wrote an account of visits to two Greek prisons there.

When I was at Smyrna the other day, I visited two prisons, one being the Central Prison near the konak (Government buildings) and the other an extemporised house of bondage in the Rue Maltaise. The former was decent as far as I penetrated – and that was only to the “no-man’s-land” between two parallel lines of bars, across which the prisoners were allowed to talk to their friends from outside. The second prison was not decent. It flanked both sides of one of those cul-de-sac passages which branch off at right angles from the narrow streets of Smyrna, and the principal cell on the ground floor had been a private warehouse under the Turkish régime. The bars which once protected the produce of the interior now penned in human beings. When I walked up to the bars and talked through them, there were about forty men inside, and I was told that at times the number rose to a hundred. Their misdemeanours varied from being suspected of a wish to join the Nationalist Army (if Turks) or not to join the Greek Army (if Greek Ottoman subjects), to being taken up drunk and disorderly in the streets, but they were all subjected to the same filthy and insanitary conditions. When I inquired about sanitary arrangements, the Greek warders burst out laughing and enlightened me by pointing to a corner of the room – undrained and on the same level as the rest of the floor, on which the prisoners slept without bedding. Several of these unhappy people told me that they were ill, and certainly most of them had the appearance of being so. They told me further that the prison was never visited by a doctor, and that they were not provided with sufficient water to drink. I must do this much justice to the Greek warders, that they let me look and talk as much as I pleased, but then I do not think it occurred to them that there was anything to be ashamed of in the condition of the people and the building under their charge.

In the other and more decent prison, I visited two prominent Turkish inhabitants of Smyrna whose imprisonment since about two months previously had created some stir. With one of them (like myself, a professor and journalist) I managed to exchange a few words in the presence of the prison authorities. To the second – a provision merchant – I only succeeded in shouting across “no-man’s-land” through the bars, but I afterwards made inquiries about his case from several sources, and give my results, with the necessary reservation that I had no time to verify them and that they represent only the prisoner’s side of the case.

There seems no doubt that, rather less than two months ago, this gentleman had suddenly been thrown into prison (where he still remains without trial) on the ground that he had been selling sugar in Smyrna at a price several piastres per “oka” below that of his fellow-merchants, who are of course mostly Greeks. He imported his sugar from Constantinople, not on his own account, but as commission-agent for an Armenian merchant in business there. Sugar so imported does not pay duty on arrival at Smyrna, because Smyrna is still juridically Ottoman territory, and the sugar is supposed to have paid the Ottoman customs-duty when it originally enters Ottoman territory at Constantinople. His accusers declared that the duty on this sugar had not in reality been paid at Constantinople; that, by making a false declaration to this effect, he had evaded paying duty altogether; and that this was how he had managed to undersell his competitors. The prisoner, on his side, maintained that duty had been paid at Constantinople; explained the lower price on the ground that the sugar sold consisted of old stocks originally bought below the current wholesale price; and pleaded that in any case he was not responsible, since he had not sold the sugar on his own account but merely as agent for a principal in Constantinople. He had memorialised the Greek High Commissioner, and in support of his contention had submitted, six weeks before my visit, twenty-four business letters, addressed to him by the merchant at Constantinople for whom he had been acting. But the Greek authorities had postponed the case pending inquiries in Constantinople, and these may take months, while the merchant remains in prison and his business goes to pieces. It appears that he has offered to find sureties up to L.T. 12,500, or to deposit that sum himself as bail in a bank, but the Greek authorities refuse to release him on bail unless the money is paid over to themselves. This is natural, but it is also natural that the merchant should refuse, in the belief that if once he paid the sum over to the authorities he would never recover it. So in prison he remains. Turkish circles in Smyrna believe that he is the victim of a plot by the Greek merchants to ruin his business. This may or may not be true, but certainly it is not incredible.

This is all that I was able to see of the Greek prisons in Smyrna during a short visit. Of course the question is one of comparison. How do these Greek prisons compare with those of the civilised countries with which Greece claims to rank, and with those of the Ottoman Empire over which she claims so great a superiority? The comparatively decent prison was originally built and equipped by the previous Ottoman authorities. The obscene prison is a new creation of the Greek régime. Perhaps the Greek authorities will claim indulgence for the conditions which I observed in the Maltesica prison on the ground that it is an emergency arrangement. But, then, how is it that the Greek administration in Smyrna needs more prison accommodation than its predecessor?

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

The propagandist

I have had certain opportunities for first-hand study of (and Turkish affairs. Just before the Balkan Wars, I spent nine months (November 1911 to August 1912) travelling on foot through the old territories of Greece, as well as in Krete and the Athos Peninsula, and though my main interest was the historical geography of the country, I learnt a good deal about the social and economic life of the modern population. During the European War, I edited, under the direction of Lord Bryce, [footnote: Whose death has removed one of the most experienced and distinguished Western students of Near and Middle Eastern questions, though this was only one among his manifold interests and activities.] the Blue Book published by the British Government on the “Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: 1915” (Miscellaneous No. 31, 1916), and incidentally learnt, I believe, nearly all that there is to be learnt to the discredit of the Turkish nation and of their rule over other peoples. Afterwards I worked, always on Turkish affairs, in the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of Information (May 1917 to May 1918); in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (May to December 1918); and in the Foreign Office section of the British Delegation to the Peace Conference at Paris (December 1918 to April 1919). Since the beginning of the 1919-20 Session, I have had the honour to hold the Koraís Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History, in the University of London; and on the 20th October 1920 the Senate of the University kindly granted me leave of absence abroad for two terms, in order to enable me to pursue the studies connected with my Chair by travel in Greek lands. I arrived at Athens from England on the 15th January 1921, and left Constantinople for England on the 15th September. During the intervening time, I saw all that I could of the situation from both the Greek and the Turkish point of view, in various parts of the two countries.

Toynbee gives us this short account of his early career in the Preface to The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922). And see the page here called Cv.

He left Balliol, where he had been teaching Greats, in 1915 to do propaganda work at the Foreign Office, starting on May 1. He was twenty-five years old.

He doesn’t name that first (pre-1917) war job. Nor does McNeill, his biographer. It was a unit, presumably under the Foreign Office, charged, according to McNeill, with publishing propaganda directed at America. Toynbee privately referred to it as the “Mendacity Bureau”. That period saw the production of most or all the wartime propaganda works, from Armenian Atrocities to Turkey, A Past and a Future, listed below.

They were written, as far as possible, with a scholar’s scruples, but must have reinforced a desire to escape from a national viewpoint in the way he would eventually write history. To his friend Rob Darbishire, September 16 1917:

There is a “Terror in France” out to complete that damned “Terror in Belgium”, but that is the last.

I’ve created three new Categories in this blog:

Armenian massacres

German terror

Greco-Turkish War

McNeill makes no distinction between the Intelligence Bureau and the Political Intelligence Department and has him starting at the latter in May 1917 (or rather “1971”). He writes: “Not surprisingly, he became responsible for political intelligence pertaining to the Ottoman Empire; but, with the collapse of Russia, his expertise was soon applied to the Moslems of Central Asia as well, and from there he went on to explore the risks of confrontation between a newly self-conscious Islamic world and a weakening British Empire – a clash which would affect India, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Africa as well as the lands directly subject to Ottoman administration.”

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Hugh Trevor-Roper on his work in the Political Intelligence Department and its sequel, in The Prophet, review of William H McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989, New York Review of Books, October 12 1989:

“Lloyd George wished to award part of Asia Minor – in particular the Greek city of Smyrna – to the Greeks. Toynbee, supported by Harold Nicolson, was opposed to this. Lloyd George’s view, naturally, prevailed. Toynbee, who anyway had little love for the Greeks, now extended his antipathy to Lloyd George. He waited for an opportunity of revenge. It was not long in coming.

“In 1919, having resigned his fellowship, Toynbee was in need of paid employment. Encouraged by his father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, he applied for a newly created professorship in the University of London. This was the Koraes Chair of Greek and Byzantine Studies at King’s College. It had been endowed by a group of rich Greeks in London, headed by the former Greek minister there, the scholar and bibliophile Ioannes Gennadius, and named after Adamantios Koraes, the literary leader of the Greek revival in the nineteenth-century. The duties of the professor were to give lectures which would emphasize the continuity of Greek culture from Antiquity through Byzantium and the dark age of Turkish oppression to the present day. On the face of it, Toynbee, with his antipathy to modern Greece [developed in part during his Wanderjahr there, 1911-12], was not an obvious choice as the first occupant of the chair. Events quickly followed which nearly made him the last.

“For only a few months after taking up his duties, Toynbee saw, no doubt with some satisfaction, the Near Eastern policy of Lloyd George, which he had vainly opposed, heading for disaster. The Greek occupation of Anatolia, authorized by the Treaty of Sèvres, provoked a Turkish nationalist revolt under Mustafa Kemal, which would ultimately lead to a Greco-Turkish war. Toynbee, who had already missed one term by visiting the Near East, applied again for leave of absence in order to see ‘how Greece is handling her Muslim minority.’ He did not tell the university authorities that he had arranged to act as special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Already, when he left London, he was inclined, if only through hatred of Lloyd George, to favor the Turkish cause, and he may have felt guilty of overdoing anti-Turkish propaganda during the war when he had compiled a Blue Book on “The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks”. [Actually, that was the name of its pamphlet distillation.]

“At all events, what he witnessed of Greek excesses in Anatolia completely converted him. He sent strong denuciations of the Greeks to the Manchester Guardian and on his return wrote, with great speed, a book on the subject. By the time it was published, the Greeks had been defeated in war and were being driven out of Asia Minor. It was now the turn of the Turks to commit atrocities, at which they were not backward. Smyrna, the birthplace of Koraes, was burned. But Toynbee, in his despatches to the Manchester Guardian, was remarkably reticent about these Turkish excesses and even suggested that Smyrna had been burned by the Greeks. He was in fact ‘blatantly partisan’ – on the Turkish side. His biographer explains that he needed to show that he had not evaded military service in vain and to enjoy the humiliation of Lloyd George.

“Such arcane psychological extenuations would hardly satisfy the London Greeks who were paying his salary as professor.”

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Here are the books that he published before (in one case in) 1934, when the Study was launched. (As in my main bibliography, I don’t promise to show the correct order of publication within a year – nor does Morton’s bibliography – and confine the list to published items or contributions of 70 pages or more.)

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915
The first magnum opus was completed before he left Balliol, and published on April 1, one month before the start of his war work. I’ve done a post on it based on an online review and will address it at length later. It was the first evidence of the ability rapidly to synthesise diverse materials that would serve him in the Survey of International Affairs.

Armenian Atrocities, The Murder of a Nation, with a Speech Delivered by Lord Bryce in the House of Lords, Hodder & Stoughton, 1915
A little over a hundred pages. It contains a Statement by Lord Bryce, a Map, and chapters called Armenia before the Massacres; The Plan of the Massacres; The Road to Death; The Journey’s End; False Excuses; Murder Outright; The Toll of Death; and The Attitude of Germany.

The New Europe, Some Essays in Reconstruction, Dent, 1915
Essays. All but one had been printed in The Nation. A spinoff, for wider circulation, of the much longer Nationality and the War, though it does not reproduce its material directly.

Contributor, Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915
A view of the whole of Greek history, ancient and modern.

Editor, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce, Hodder & Stoughton and His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916
The “Blue Book” on the massacres of Armenians in Turkey presented to the Foreign Secretary, and subsequently to both Houses of Parliament, in 1916, and still one of the main bodies of evidence for the alleged genocide. Toynbee worked under the direction of Bryce, whom he met first in 1915. I have mentioned Bryce several times. The report as published contains a Map; Correspondence between Viscount Grey of Fallodon and Viscount Bryce; a Preface by Viscount Bryce; a Letter by Mr. H.A.L. Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Prof. Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Mr. Moorfield Storey, ex-President of the American Bar Association, to Viscount Bryce; a Letter from Four German Missionaries to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Berlin; a Memorandum by the Editor of the Documents (Toynbee); and 149 General Descriptions, eye-witness and other documents presented in twenty sections. After that we have A Summary of Armenian History up to and including the year 1915 in six parts by Toynbee; six Annexes prepared by Toynbee; an Index of Places referred to in the Documents; and a Message, dated 22nd July, 1916, from Mr. N., of Constantinople; communicated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief.
I have a post called Propaganda and intelligence here, looking at how hearsay was used as intelligence during this period.

The Belgian Deportations, with a Statement by Viscount Bryce, T Fisher Unwin, 1917

The German Terror in Belgium, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917

The German Terror in France, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917
Those three titles belong together. Toynbee writes in a Preface:

The German Terror in France is a direct continuation of The German Terror in Belgium, which was published several months ago. The chapters are numbered consecutively throughout the two volumes [...].

Turkey, A Past and a Future, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917
A study of the consequences of the Turkish revolution of 1908 and the events leading up to the Armenian massacres and deportations.

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922
An important work, the second magnum opus, based on Toynbee’s second visit to Turkey, reporting on the Greco-Turkish war for The Manchester Guardian in 1921.

Introduction and translations, Greek Civilization and Character, The Self-Revelation of Ancient Greek Society, Dent, 1924

Introduction and translations, Greek Historical Thought from Homer to the Age of Heraclius, with two pieces newly translated by Gilbert Murray, Dent, 1924
Two volumes of translations which Toynbee had made before the war. (Another work, based at least on pre-war notes, which was not published until much later, was Hellenism, The History of a Civilization, OUP, Home University Library, 1959. It had been commissioned by his father-in-law Gilbert Murray in 1914. The war intervened. Hannibal’s Legacy, the magnum opus of 1964, had been been on his agenda since the same year. The Preface of Some Problems of Greek History, 1969, begins: “The problems discussed in this book have been in my mind since the years 1909-11, when I was reading for the Oxford School of Literae Humaniores.”)

Contributor, The Non-Arab Territories of the Ottoman Empire since the Armistice of the 30th October, 1918, in HWV Temperley, editor, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol 6, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1924

The World after the Peace Conference, Being an Epilogue to the “History of the Peace Conference of Paris” and a Prologue to the “Survey of International Affairs, 1920-1923”, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1925
This was published on its own, but GM Gathorne-Hardy, the Institute’s Honorary Secretary, writes in a Preface that it was

originally written as an introduction to the Survey of International Affairs in 1920-3, and was intended for publication as part of the same volume.

In Experiences, Toynbee calls this cross-section of the world c 1920 a “base-line” for the Survey.

With Kenneth P Kirkwood, Turkey, Benn, in Modern Nations series edited by HAL Fisher, 1926
I have not consulted this.

The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1928

A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen, Constable, 1931
The book of a journey to Japan and back (via China, pace the title) in 1929-30.

Editor, British Commonwealth Relations, Proceedings of the First Unofficial Conference at Toronto, 11-21 September 1933, with a Foreword by Robert L Borden, OUP, Issued under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1934

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One could add to this pre-Study list two short works, among many articles and other material:

The Destruction of Poland, A Study in German Efficiency, T Fisher Unwin, almost certainly 1916

and

“The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks”, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce, Hodder & Soughton, 1917
A rather blatant piece of work. A pamphlet distillation of the two other Armenian works.

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Let’s look again at his evolution. According to Morton, Toynbee published his first learned article while he was at Oxford in 1910: On Herodotus III. 90, and VII. 75, 76, Classical Review, Vol 24, No 8. You can find it online. Another, The Growth of Sparta, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol 33, Part 2 followed in 1913. 1914 sees two more: Greek Policy since 1882, Oxford pamphlets, Vol 9, No 39, OUP and The Slav Peoples, Political Quarterly, No 4, December 1914. In those first four pieces we see classical interests vaulting towards urgent contemporary ones.

Toynbee’s first visit to Greece and territory that was then Turkey had been made during a post-University “gap year” in 1911-12. It was a formative experience, and often alluded to, but did not produce its own book. His longest piece of published historical writing on Greece before 1934 was a contribution, Greece, in The Balkans, A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, various authors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1915.

The second visit to Greece and Turkey took up most of 1921, when CP Scott’s Manchester Guardian sent him to report on the Greco-Turkish War. He had been appointed, in 1919, to the Koraes Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History at King’s College, University of London, but was given leave to travel. The result was The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922).

This is a rugged work of reportage of a war (and to some extent a travel narrative) which shows an utterly out-of-the-ordinary grasp of history for such a piece, but does not lose touch with the subject. The language is simple, different from the sinuosities and contortions of the Study (particularly the later parts of the Study). One almost regrets that Toynbee was about to leave its sturdy realism behind and set off on his grand project. At the same time, the subtitle, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, hints at what was to follow; and it was on a train, while en route back to England from this assignment, somewhere after Adrianople on September 17 1921, as he tells us in a Preface to Volume VII of the Study, that he formed thoughts which led to the drafting that evening of part of the plan for his work. Of course, the Study’s origins are more complex than that, and I will trace them in another post.

During his 1921 travels, Toynbee began to take a position more favourable to Turkey. I have done two posts which look at this change: Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 1 and Atatürk’s frown. His later reminiscences make clear that it came partly from a sense of shame at the tone of the propaganda writings. He writes in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey:

It may, I fear, be painful to Greeks and “Philhellenes” that information and reflections unfavourable to Greece should have been published by the first occupant of the Koraís Chair. I naturally regret this, but from the academic point of view it is less unfortunate than if my conclusions on the Anatolian Question had been favourable to Greece and unfavourable to Turkey. The actual circumstances, whatever personal unpleasantness they may entail for me and my Greek friends and acquaintances, at least preclude the suspicion that an endowment of learning in a British University has been used for propaganda on behalf of the country with which it is concerned. Such a contention, if it could be urged, would be serious; for academic study should have no political purpose, although, when its subject is history, its judgments upon the nature and causal connection of past events do occasionally and incidentally have some effect upon the present and the future.

But these views, published in 1922, and following an absence from duty of nearly a year, forced him out of the Greek-funded Koraes Chair in 1924, and towards Chatham House. He never held another conventional full-time academic post. Chatham House offered something mid-way between academia and public affairs.

In the post here called Atatürk’s frown Toynbee describes some of his Turkish friendships. In Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 1, he remembers

the atmosphere of animosity against Islam and against the Turks in which I had grown up.

He writes in Experiences (1969):

I originally broke my way into current affairs by following up the main line – that is, the Levantine line – of the sequel to the Graeco-Roman civilization till this mental journey brought me to the living civilizations of the Near and Middle East. Between 1911 [his first visit to the region] and 1923 [his third], I was, I think, in danger of letting myself become imprisoned in a couple of specialisms. I was then heading for becoming a combination of “Balkanist” with “ancient historian”. Fortunately I was saved from being caught in this blind alley by a personal mishap. I became personally involved in a conflict between two Near Eastern nationalisms. I had, in consequence, to resign the Koraes Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in the University of London; and, in taking another job [at Chatham House], I found that I had committed myself to expanding my study of current affairs from the Near and Middle East to the contemporary world as a whole. I had undertaken to produce a Survey of International Affairs for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the commitment required me not to leave any region of the present-day world out of account. I must try to follow current events not only in the Near and Middle East and not only in Europe and the United States but in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and China as well.

History and current affairs were parallel seams in his career from then on. He often says that he could not have written A Study of History, which was published between 1934 and 1961, if he had not also been working, from 1924 to ’56, on the The Survey of International Affairs. The Survey, which was not propaganda, was published under Chatham House’s auspices between 1925 and 1977 and covered the years 1920 to 1962.

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This post describes the pre-Study œuvre. Before 1934, “Arnold Toynbee” meant not the historian, but his uncle, the economic historian and social reformer (1852-83). The older Arnold Toynbee’s brother Paget, the Dante scholar, took Toynbee to task for using his uncle’s name on the title page of his first book. He could have added or substituted an initial.

I described the post-1933 œuvre here. I listed the main post-Study works there in order to emphasise that the Study was not the end of Toynbee any more than the beginning. It’s a sign of sanity to finish a project and move on; which, apart from the Caplan collaboration, is what he did.

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The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

William H McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989 (letter quotation)

The German Terror in France, An Historical Record, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917

The World after the Peace Conference, Being an Epilogue to the “History of the Peace Conference of Paris” and a Prologue to the “Survey of International Affairs, 1920-1923”, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1925

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

Experiences, OUP, 1969

The shot heard round the world 2

The shot heard round the world 1

The latter part of Toynbee’s public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 1961.

In the first part he looked at the impact of America’s revolution in other countries. But how direct was its influence? How did it affect the French revolution, which would have happened anyway? The American revolution’s roots were equally in the Enlightenment.

It was an inspiration, an exemplar for overturning a régime, like the Dutch Revolt and the English revolution.

The Marquis de Lafayette helped the Americans in the war of 1775-83 and was in America from 1777 to ’82, with a break in France in 1779. He returned as a hero in 1824-5, visiting every state. The Declaration of Independence influenced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly in 1789.

In the first extract, Toynbee, who was so aware of the temptations of nationalism, fails, like many nineteenth-century liberals, to distinguish carefully between nationalist and social revolutions, as if freedom from foreign oppression were itself Liberty. He speaks like an old-fashioned man of that century.

The American revolution was social first, national second. The Americans were overthrowing an oppressor, but it was their government and society that these colonies professed to be seeking to reform. What kinds of societies would the peoples who had heard the American “shot” produce?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Once America had separated itself, it became clear that the fragment continued to oppress many of its members.

Toynbee is romantically unrealistic when he recalls the America of 1961, that “leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests”, to its revolutionary traditions in its foreign policy. At one point he seems to defend revolutionary violence. He was especially provocative in implying a sympathy for Castro.

This lecture was, perhaps, a turning-point in his relationship with America, the country that had welcomed him with something like adulation in the late ’40s and the ’50s. His Study of History had seemed to have important things to say to America during its “rise to globalism”. He supported the civil rights movement, and opposed the Vietnam War in the ’60s and ’70s, and his later and bleak view of American foreign policy is reflected here in posts called Neo-colonialism: The view from 1969 and The frontier spirit.

What we are hearing now, above the echoing sound of that American shot, is the answering voice of the mass of mankind. This two-thirds – or is it three-quarters? – of the World’s population is still living only just above the starvation line and is still frequently falling below even that wretched line into death-dealing famine. Since the time when our pre-human ancestors became human, this majority of the human race has never dreamed, before today, that there would ever be any change for the better in its hard lot. Since the dawn of civilization, about 5000 years ago, the World’s peasantry has carried the load of civilization on its back without receiving any appreciable share in civilization’s benefits. These benefits have been monopolized by a tiny privileged minority, and, until yesterday, this injustice was inevitable. Till the modern industrial revolution began to get up steam, technology was not capable of producing more than a tiny surplus after meeting the requirements of bare subsistence. In our time, technology is coming within sight of being able to produce enough of civilization’s material benefits to provide for the whole human race. If technology does make it possible to get rid of the odious ancient difference in fortune between the few rich and the innumerable poor, future generations will perhaps bless the Industrial Revolution in retrospect, and will think kindly of its British, American and German pioneers.

We already have the means for making a start in improving the lot of the great depressed majority of our fellow human beings. But, in the last resort, we human beings have to do things for ourselves. The World’s peasantry cannot hope to improve its lot substantially unless it can awake from its age-old lethargy. It is being awakened at this moment by the sound of that American shot as that sound circles the globe for the third time. That sound has now been heard by the World’s whole depressed majority, and we, the affluent minority, are now hearing the majority’s reply. At last, the majority is shaking off the fatalism that has been paralysing it since the beginning of time. It is becoming alive to the truth that an improvement in its lot is now possible. More than that, it is realizing that it can do something towards this by its own efforts. Go to India; visit some of the thousands of villages there in which the Community Development Plan is already in operation; and you will see, with your own eyes, this new hope and purposefulness and energy breaking into flower. This is, to my mind, the most wonderful sight that there is to be seen in the present-day world. And this world-revolution of the peasantry is the most glorious revolution that there has been in the World’s history so far.

Well, perhaps I ought to have said “the most glorious secular revolution”; for the religious revolutions may have been more glorious; and these may also, in the long run, prove to have had still greater and more beneficent effects. By the religious revolutions I mean the advent of the World’s missionary religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and the others. The new world revolution of the peasantry perhaps cannot properly be called a religious revolution. At the same time it is unquestionably a spiritual one. It is true that the objectives that are its first aim are of a material kind. These material objectives are as elementary as they are indispensable for making a start. They are such fundamental things as a concrete lining and lip for the village well, to protect the water from being contaminated; a concrete surface for the village lanes, to redeem them from being wallows of pestilent filth; a dirt-road to link the village up with the nearest main road; and, after that, a village school. When a village reaches the stage of building a school and finding the means to provide a living for a schoolmaster, it is already beginning to raise a spiritual mansion on the preliminary material foundations. Without the foundations, the building could not go up. But the material foundations are a means to a spiritual end. And what could be more obviously spiritual than the awakening of hope and purposefulness and energy that is the driving force behind the whole of this glorious revolution? This driving force is the last and greatest of the revolutionary forces that have been released, all round the World, by the sound of a shot that was fired, on an April day, by embattled American farmers.

This exhilarating sound has not only roused the peoples of the World to action in their own homelands; it has also drawn them, like a magnet, to the land in which the shot was fired and from which the sound has gone forth. For a century, European farmers flocked to the United States in order to become American farmers, and, as the Industrial Revolution got up steam on both sides of the Atlantic, European industrial workers were soon crossing the Atlantic westward in the farmers’ wake. The tide of immigration into the United States began to flow mightily within a few years of the end of the Napoleonic Wars [when there was a severe depression in Europe]. It went on flowing till the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. And, as it flowed, it gathered volume. Before it was abruptly checked in 1914 by the action of the belligerent European governments that were concerned to conserve their cannon-fodder, the annual total of immigrants had risen to about two million in more than one year after the turn of the century.

When I think of this century of massive immigration from Europe into Europe’s American promised land, my mind focuses on my memory’s picture of an old farmer, Bavarian-born, whom I met on my first visit to this country, now nearly thirty-six years ago. His farm was in East Central Kentucky, where I was staying with a college friend of mine. At home in Bavaria, this farmer had had no farm of his own and no prospect of ever acquiring one there. It had been the hope of winning one in the New World that had lured him across the Atlantic. Though he had emigrated while he was still a young man, he had not arrived till some year in the eighteen-nineties, and by that time, of course, all the best land in the state had been taken up long ago. In Kentucky by the eighteen-nineties, settlement had been going on for more than a hundred years. All the same, this Bavarian farmer had come in time still to be a pioneer. In the western foothills of the Appalachians – “the Knobs” is their local name – he had hit upon a valley that was still unreclaimed because no predecessor of his had found it sufficiently inviting. The Bavarian had seized on that valley and had made it fruitful. To transform it had been his life-work. He had not only made it yield him enough for raising a family. By the time his sons were grown up – and there were several of them – the father had also saved enough to be able to buy for each son a better farm than the father’s own. But the old man would never buy a better farm for himself. The valley-farm had been his life-work, and, more than that, it had been his European dream translated into an American reality. As a boy in Bavaria he had dreamed of one day having a farm of his own if he could screw up his courage to pull up his roots and cross the Ocean. In this unpromising valley in Kentucky he had made his farm and his farm had made him. Nothing this side of death would part him from it.

Multiply this Bavarian-American farmer by some millions and you have a revolution inside America to match those revolutions all round the World of which I have given you a breathless catalogue. America’s revolution on her own ground and her revolutions abroad have been like each other in everything that is important in them. They have both been set going by the shot fired in April 1775; they have both been triumphs over social injustice, poverty, and hopelessness. These revolutions are true daughters of the American Revolution, and to have fathered this mighty brood is indeed an achievement to be proud of. And now come the paradox, and, I should also say, the tragedy. At the moment when the sound of that historic American shot was circling this planet for the third time, at the moment when the American revolutionary spirit had come within sight of inspiring the whole human race, America herself disowned paternity, at least for the younger and less decorous batches of her offspring.

It has been suggested recently by at least one American student of American history that America did not wait till the twentieth century to dissociate herself from the World’s response to the resounding American shot’s reverberations. The founding fathers of the United States lived to witness the French Revolution, and at least one of the most eminent of them, John Adams, put on record his repudiation and rejection of the American Revolution’s French eldest daughter after she had jilted Lafayette and had plunged into Jacobinism. I owe my knowledge of the following passage to an article by William Henry Chamberlin in The Wall Street Journal of 31 March 1961. John Adams is quoted by Mr Chamberlin as having said that “Helvetius and Rousseau preached to the French nation liberty till they made them the most mechanical slaves; equality, till they destroyed all equity; humanity, until they became weasels and African panthers; and fraternity, till they cut one another’s throats like Roman gladiators”.

This bitter verdict on the Jacobin revolution gives us some notion of how John Adams and like-minded American contemporaries of his would have reacted to the Communist revolution, if they could have lived to witness this still more violent subsequent response to the echoes of the revolution which the founding fathers themselves had launched. The founding fathers had, no doubt, carried their own revolution just as far as they had intended, and evidently some of them were unwilling to see revolution, either at home or abroad, go even one inch farther. This is indicated by the bitterness of those words of John Adams’s that I have just quoted. But his words are not only bitter; they are also ironic. They bring out the irony of the contrast between intentions and results; and this is one of the perennial ironies of human life. It is seldom indeed that the consequences of human action work out according to plan; and one might venture on the generalization that they never work out as intended when the action is of the violent kind represented by revolution and war. The more violent the initial act, the more likely it will be that its consequences will escape control. Has there ever been a revolution or a war that has produced the results, and none other than the results, that its authors intended and expected? The American revolutionaries, like their French counterparts, and unlike at least one celebrated batch of Roman gladiators [to what is he referring?], were not “too proud to fight”; and they could not fire their shot without its being heard by other ears, and without its being taken as a signal for non-American, and perhaps un-American, action. In illustrating the vanity of human wishes by the example of the Jacobins, John Adams was unconsciously passing judgement on himself as well. Fabula de te narratur is the comment that he invites in retrospect. But Adams’s anti-Jacobin invective, which thus recoils like a boomerang on Adams himself, leaves his co-founding father Jefferson unscathed. Jefferson recognized that the price of political liberty would be “turbulence”, and he was not distressed by this prospect. “I hold,” he wrote to Madison, “that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

“Too proud to fight” was a phrase used by Woodrow Wilson to defend American neutrality in the First World War. It was immediately used against him.

Thus Adams’s conservatism was not shared by all the founding fathers; and Emerson was not the first American to acclaim the World Revolution and to recognize it as being the American Revolution’s offspring. America had already given a blessing to the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe which it would be difficult for her ever to revoke, since it has been written into the map of American place-names. The names of the Corsican, Greek, Polish, and Hungarian revolutionary leaders Paoli, Ypsilandi, Kosciusko, and Kossuth have been thus immortalized. On the other hand, no Leninburg or Trotskyville has ever jumped out of the map of the United States to catch my eye. Of course there is less room for putting new names on this map nowadays than there used to be. Yet, if tomorrow a new territory of the United States were to be staked out on the face of the Moon, I do not think that any of the mushroom cities there would be likely to be called Fidel, though Fidel is really rather a beautiful name if American lips could pronounce it dispassionately.

Today America is no longer the inspirer and leader of the World Revolution, and I have an impression that she is embarrassed and annoyed when she is reminded that this was her original mission. No one else laid this mission upon America. She chose it for herself, and for one hundred and forty-two years, reckoning from the year 1775, she pursued this revolutionary mission with an enthusiasm which has proved deservedly infectious. By contrast, America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number. America’s decision to adopt Rome’s role has been deliberate, if I have gauged it right. It has been deliberate, yet, in the spirit that animates this recent American movement in reverse, I miss the enthusiasm and the confidence that made the old revolutionary America irresistible. Lafayette pays a high psychological price when he transforms himself into Metternich. Playing Metternich is not a happy role. It is not a hero’s role, and not a winner’s, and the player knows it. But, in those early nineteenth-century years when the real Metternich was fighting his losing battle to shore up the rickety edifice of restored “legitimacy”, who in the World would have guessed that America, of all countries, would one day cast herself for Metternich’s dreary part?

What has happened? The simplest account of it is, I suppose, that America has joined the minority. In 1775 she was in the ranks of the majority, and this is one reason why the American Revolution has evoked a world-wide response. For the non-American majority of the majority, the American revolutionary appeal has been as attractive as it was for eighteenth-century America herself. Eighteenth-century America was still appreciably poorer than the richest of the eighteenth-century West European countries: Britain, Holland, the Austrian Netherlands, France. No doubt America was, even then, already considerably richer than Asia or Africa; yet, even measured by this standard, her wealth at that time was not enormous. What has happened? While the sound of the shot fired beside the bridge at Concord has been three times circling the globe, and has each time been inciting all people outside America to redouble their revolutionary efforts, America herself has been engaged on another job than the one that she finished on her own soil in 1783. She has been winning the West and has been mastering the technique of industrial productivity. In consequence, she has become rich beyond all precedent. And, when the American sputnik’s third round raised the temperature of the World Revolution to a height that was also unprecedented, America felt herself impelled to defend the wealth that she had now gained against the mounting revolutionary forces that she herself had first called into existence.

What was the date at which America boxed the compass in steering her political course? As I see it, this date is pin-pointed by three events: the reaction in the United States to the second Russian revolution of 1917 and the two United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924.

The American reaction to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was not, of course, peculiar to the American people. It was the same as the reaction of the rich people in all countries. Only, in the United States, it was a nation-wide reaction, because, in the United States, the well-to-do section of the population had become, by that time, a large majority, not the small minority that the rich have been and still are in most other parts of the World so far.

Rich people, not only in the United States but everywhere, have, I think, taken Communism in a very personal way. They have seen in Communism a threat to their pocket-books. So Communism, even when it has raised its head in some far-away country, has not felt to the rich like a foreign affair; the threat has seemed close and immediate, like the threat from gangsters in the streets of one’s home town. I think this explains the fact – and I am sure this is the fact – that Russian Communist aggression has got under the skins of the well-to-do in the Western World, while German nationalist aggression has not angered them to the same degree. This relative complacency towards German aggressiveness, as contrasted with the violence of the reaction to Russian aggressiveness, has made an impression on me because, I confess, it makes me bristle. I have noticed it among the rich minority in my own country, and I have noticed it still more among a wider circle of people in the United States. It is a rather startling piece of self-exposure. It is startling because, among the various dangers with which we have been threatened in our time, the danger to our personal property is not the one that we ought really to take most tragically. As a matter of fact, the well-to-do Western middle class would have been fleeced economically by the Germans, as thoroughly as this could be done by any Communists, if Germany had happened to win either the first or the second world war – and Germany came within an ace of winning each of these wars in turn. But the tragic loss that would have been inflicted on the Western World by a German victory would have been the loss of our political and our spiritual liberty. In two fearful wars that have been brought upon us by Germany within the span of a single life-time, we have saved our liberty at an immense loss in infinitely precious human lives. We have had no war with Russia in our life-time, and the Western and the Communist camp are not doomed to go to war with each other, though at present the common threat of self-annihilation in an atomic third world war hangs over us all.

Of course someone might reply to what I have just been saying by admitting the whole of my indictment of Germany but pointing out, at the same time, that Russia, too, threatens our political and spiritual freedom, besides threatening just our pockets. This is true. Yet, if I had to make the terrible choice between being conquered by a nationalist Germany and being conquered by a Communist Russia, I myself would opt for Russian Communism as against German nationalism. I would opt for it as being the less odious of the two régimes to live under. Nationalism, German or other, has no aim beyond the narrow-hearted aim of pursuing one’s own national self-interest at the expense of the rest of the human race. By contrast, Communism has in it an element of universalism. It does stand in principle for winning social justice for that great majority of mankind that has hitherto received less than its fair share of the benefits of civilization. I know very well that, in politics, principle is never more than partially translated into practice; I know that the generous-minded vein in Communism is marred by the violent and intolerant-minded vein in it. I also recognize that Communism in both Russia and China has been partly harnessed to a Russian and a Chinese nationalism that is no more estimable than German nationalism or any other nationalism is. Yet, when all this has been said, I still find myself feeling that the reaction of rich individuals and rich nations in the West to Communism since 1917 has been an “acid test”, to use President Wilson’s memorable words [the phrase is used in his Fourteen Points]. Anyway, it is, I think, indisputable that the reaction in the United States to Communism in and since the year 1917 has been a symptom of a reversal of America’s political course. It is a sign, I think, that the American people is now feeling and acting as a champion of an affluent minority’s vested interests, in dramatic contrast to America’s historic role as the revolutionary leader of the depressed majority of mankind.

The United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924 are, I believe, pointers to the same change in the American people’s attitude during and immediately after the First World War. Naturally I realize the urgent practical considerations that moved the Administration and the Congress to enact this legislation. The First World War had just brought to light a disturbing feature in this country’s domestic life: I mean, the persistence of the hyphen. [He means in phrases such as Italian-American and Irish-American.] An appreciable number of United States citizens, and of immigrants who were on their way to becoming citizens, had proved still to have divided loyalties. The American melting-pot had not yet purged out of their hearts the last residue of their hereditary attachment to their countries of origin on the European side of the Atlantic. There was evidently a long road still to travel before the process of assimilation would be completed, and this race between assimilation and immigration might never be won for Americanism unless the annual intake of immigrants were drastically reduced. Moreover, the pre-war immigrants were under criticism not only for still being pulled two ways by divided loyalties; they were also under suspicion of perhaps not being representative samples of the best European human material. The introduction of an annual quota would enable the United States Bureau of Immigration to sift the candidates for admission and to select those who promised to make the best future American citizens, and the policy of restriction was thus recommended by a eugenic motive as well as by a political one.

These considerations, by themselves, would have made some measure of restriction and selection desirable after the First World War anyway. But the main motive for the enactment of the acts of 1921 and 1924 was, I believe, a different one. Europe had just been ravaged by a war of unprecedented magnitude and severity. European belligerent governments had stopped their subjects from emigrating in order to conserve their supplies of cannon-fodder. And, now that the war was over, it was feared in the United States that the flow of immigration would start again, and this time in an unprecedented volume. A flood of penniless Europeans might pour into the United States in quest of fortunes in the New World to compensate for ruin in the Old World, and this probable rush of millions of European paupers to win a share in America’s prosperity was felt to be a menace to the economic interests of the existing inhabitants of the United States, who had a monopoly of America’s wealth at present.

If I am right in this diagnosis of the main motive for the United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924, the American people went on the defensive at this time against the impact of European immigration for the same reason that made America react so strongly against Communism. Both these reactions were those of a rich man who is concerned to defend his private property against the importunity of a mass of poorer people who are surging all round him and are loudly demanding a share in the rich man’s wealth.

What would have been the effects on America’s economic life if immigration into the United States had been left, down to this day, as free as it was during the century ending in 1921? Presumably the present population of the United States would have been much larger than it actually is, but it does not necessarily follow that the average income per head would have been lower. Experience tells us that a country’s total annual product is not a fixed amount. It may be increased by various factors. One of these stimuli to production may be a steep rise in the volume of population through a reinforcement of the natural increase by immigration. For example, the massive and unrestricted immigration into West Germany from East Germany since the end of the Second World War has been one, at least, of the causes of West Germany’s unexpected and surprising post-war economic prosperity. On this analogy it is conceivable that the economic effects of the United States immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924 was contrary to the legislators’ intentions and expectations. While conserving the previous income per head of the existing population of the United States, the immigration restriction acts may have prevented the income per head from rising so fast and so high as it might have done if immigration had been left unrestricted. A continuance of unrestricted immigration might also perhaps have saved the United States from the great depression of the nineteen-thirties. These are hypothetical questions which even an economist might find it hard to answer, and I am not an economist. But I would suggest to you that, whatever the economic consequences of those immigration restriction acts may have been, these economic consequences have not been the most important. The political and psychological consequences have, I should say, counted for more, and these non-economic consequences have, I should also say, been unfortunate for America as well as for Europe.

So long as immigration into the United States from Europe was unrestricted, America’s ever open door kept America in touch with the common lot of the human race. The human race, as a whole, was poor, as it still is; and America was then still a poor man’s country. She was a poor man’s country in the stimulating sense of being the country that was the poor man’s hope. She was the country, of all countries, in which a poor immigrant could look forward to improving his economic position by his own efforts. America did not, of course, even then, offer this opportunity to immigrants from the whole of the Old World. The opportunity was always restricted to immigrants from one small corner of the Old World, namely Europe. All the same, so long as America still offered herself as even just the European poor man’s hope, she retained her footing as part of the majority of the human race. In so far as she has closed her doors since 1921, she has cut herself off from the majority. This self-insulation is the inevitable penalty of finding that one has become rich and then taking steps to protect one’s new-found well-being. The impulse to protect wealth, if one has it, is one of the natural human impulses. It is not particularly sinful, but it automatically brings a penalty with it that is out of proportion to its sinfulness. This penalty is isolation. It is a fearful thing to be isolated from the majority of one’s fellow-creatures, and this will continue to be the social and moral price of wealth so long as poverty continues to be the normal condition of the World’s ordinary men and women.

I will close this first lecture in the present series by trying to drive this point home in a piece of fantasy. Let us imagine a transmigration of souls in reverse. Let us slip our own generation’s souls into the bodies of the generation of 1775, and then set the reel of history unwinding with this change in its make-up. The result that we shall obtain by this sleight of hand will be startlingly different from the actual course of events in 1775 and thereafter. The Declaration of Independence will now be made, not in Philadelphia, but at Westminster. King George III will raise his standard, not at the Court of St. James’s, but at Independence Hall (of course that building will not bear its historic revolutionary name; it will be called “Royal Hall” or “Legitimacy Hall” or some other respectable conservative name of the kind). The other George, George Washington, will take command of his royal namesake’s army. There will be no Continental Congress here in Philadelphia for George Washington to serve. The revolutionary parliament will be on the other side of the Ocean. It will be at Westminster. And the revolutionary leader will not be a George, but a Charles, namely Charles James Fox. The bridge beside which the embattled farmers will fire their shot will not be the bridge at Concord. The flood that it spans will be the Thames. The shot will be heard round the World, but it will be an Old-World shot, not a New-World one.

This nonsense that I have just been talking will have had its use if it has illustrated my thesis. I am maintaining that, since 1917, America has reversed her role in the World. She has become the arch-conservative power instead of the arch-revolutionary one. Stranger still, she has made a present of her glorious discarded role to the country which was the arch-conservative power in the nineteenth century, the country which, since 1946, has been regarded by America as being America’s Enemy Number One. America has presented her historic revolutionary role to Russia.

Is this reversal of roles America’s irrevocable choice? Is it a choice that she can afford to make? And, if she were to change her mind once again, would it now still be possible for America to rejoin her own revolution after having parted company with it forty-four years ago? I shall be taking up these questions in the second and third lectures in this series.

The second and third lectures were called The Handicap of Affluence and Can America Re-Join Her Own Revolution? The first, of which I have quoted all but the opening in these two posts, was called The Shot Heard round the World.

For the first post, I referred to the extract in EWF Tomlin, editor, Arnold Toynbee, A Selection from His Works, with an introduction by Tomlin, OUP, 1978, posthumous.

For this post, ie the remainder of the lecture, I referred to Questia’s online version of America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, New York, OUP, 1962, which prints three sets of lectures given in different places in the New World in 1961 and ’62. The quotation from Jefferson is garbled here. I have corrected it. I have presumptively corrected one or two other mistakes: texts on Questia are not page-images and are not reliable. The Pennsylvania lectures were printed in the UK on their own as America and the World Revolution, OUP, 1962.

America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, New York, OUP, 1962

The shot heard round the world 1

In public lectures delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 1961, Toynbee reminded his audience of “the revolutionary tradition which the United States had inaugurated and which she needed to re-join if she were to continue to play a positive role in the world” (EWF Tomlin).

I am just old enough to remember the time when Britain was still rich and strong enough to be the principal target for poorer and weaker peoples’ malice. Baiting is one of mankind’s oldest games, but the victim has to be a substantial one if the game is to be fun. Twisting the lion’s tail ceases to be rewarding if the lion shrinks to the size of a cat; but if a buzzard swells to the size of an eagle, it then becomes worthwhile to pull out the bird’s tail-feathers. It is not easy to adjust oneself to a rapid decrease in one’s wealth and power, but the transition is eased by one consoling form of relief. In being relieved of power and wealth, one is automatically relieved from odium. Experto crede. I am speaking from my own country’s experience in my own lifetime. We have been released from the odium that used to hang round Britain’s neck like the Ancient Mariner’s murdered albatross. The neck that is now adorned by the corpse of that albatross is America’s. When we British look at America nowadays, our feelings are mixed. We feel consoled for the recent change in our position in the world; at the same time we sympathize with you for the change in your position. I do hope that the second of these two feelings will make itself obvious to you in this present course of lectures by a British speaker. In examining America’s situation in the World today, I can say, with my hand on my heart, that my feelings are sympathetic, not malicious. After all, mere regard for self-interest, apart from any more estimable considerations, would deter America’s allies from wishing America ill. If, absit omen, America were to be worsted by her present ordeal, this would be as great a misfortune for her friends and associates as it would be for America herself.

I suppose many of us in this room have stood, more than once in our lives, on the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, and have then crossed the bridge to read, engraved on a bronze plaque, a poem that we already knew by heart. As far as I remember, I first got to know this poem of Emerson’s through being given it, at school, to translate into Greek verse. The school was in England, not in America. The date must have been about 1905. That would be one hundred and thirty years after the day on which the historic shot had been fired by embattled American farmers. That was time enough to have made it possible for English schoolmasters and English schoolboys to look back at what had happened in April 1775 without having our vision blurred by irrelevant national sore feelings. What thrilled us, in England in 1905, at the sound of that shot, was the point that has been put inimitably by Emerson in the eight monosyllabic words of his immortal line. We forgot that the shot had been aimed at red-coats. We remembered that it had been heard round the world. That shot now meant for us, too, what it had meant for your ancestors. I myself, for instance, made my pilgrimage to the bridge at Concord the first time I visited the United States, which was in 1925.

A poet knows how to sum up in one line what it takes an historian at least several pages to recite. Within these last one hundred and eighty-six years the sound of that American shot has been travelling round and round the globe like a Russian sputnik. It had been heard in France before the eighteenth century was over. It was heard in Spanish America and in Greece while the nineteenth century was still young. In 1848, when the nineteenth century was not yet quite half spent, the sound reverberated, like a thunderclap, over the whole of Continental Europe. It was heard in Italy, and Italy arose from the dead. The Italian Risorgimento was evoked by that American shot. The sound was heard in Paris again in 1871; this time the Commune was Paris’s response to it. Travelling on eastward, the sound touched off the Russian revolution of 1905, the Persian revolution of 1906, and the Turkish revolution of 1908. By that date it had already roused the Founding Fathers of the Indian National Congress. I believe, by the way, that the original instigator of the Indian Congress Movement was an Englishman [he is thinking of Allan Octavian Hume or William Wedderburn]. If I am right about this, that Englishman launched a far bigger movement than he can have realized at the time. The Indian Congress Movement has been the mother of all the independence movements in all the Asian and African countries that, till recently, have been under the rule of West European colonial powers. But, anyway, whoever may deserve the credit for having started the Indian Congress Movement, the inspiration of it came from the sound of that American shot as this sound travelled over the Indian sub-continent on its eastward course. By this time it had gathered a speed that must have been greater than the speed of light. By 1911, the year in which the sound was heard in China, it had already been heard on the far side of the pacific, in Mexico. It had already touched off the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

By 1910, the eastward-travelling American sputnik had come round, full circle, to re-visit the New World. But it did not stop at that point. Its momentum was still unexhausted. It sped forward for the second time over the Atlantic to re-awaken the Old World’s seven sleepers with still more thunderous reverberations than it had detonated at its first visitation. In 1917 Russia heard that American sound for the second time, and this time she heard it with a vengeance. Turkey heard it for the second time after the end of the First World War, and this time the sound touched off the radical Westernizing Turkish revolution led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Compared with this second Turkish revolution of 1919-’28, the Turkish revolution of 1908 had been half-hearted. In April 1923, just one hundred and forty-eight years after the firing of that shot, far away, at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, I heard the sound reach Ankara, Turkey’s new capital, where I happened, at that moment, to find myself. There and then, I was given an inkling of what it must have felt like to be in the streets of Paris in 1789 or beside the bridge at Concord in 1775.

The sound did not flag or falter. It went on making its second circuit of the globe. In China, in 1948, its second visitation produced the same enormously enhanced effects as its previous second visitations in Russia and in Turkey. Speeding across the Pacific for the second time, the indefatigable sound called the Bolivian miners to arms and roused the Guatemalan peasants to demand a re-distribution of the land. In 1960 it roused the peasants of Cuba. Fidel Castro must have been surprised and gratified by the attention that he has won for himself in the United States. He has had the advantage of standing so close to the American people’s ear that, by shouting into it, he has been able to make it tingle. He wanted to annoy America, and he succeeded. But, if he had not had the luck to be so close to you, his oratory would have been drowned; for, before the end of 1960, the sound of the embattled American farmers’ shot had crossed the Atlantic for the third time and had roused up the whole of Africa from Sharpeville to Algiers.

At this moment at which I am speaking to you here in this room, I am surprised that I have succeeded, like Fidel Castro, in making my annoying words heard above that other sound’s roar. For, by now, the sound of the embattled farmers’ shot “is gone out through all the Earth”, to quote the Psalmist’s words. The noise has become world-wide and it has become deafening. Jefferson hit the mark when he said that “the disease of liberty is catching”.

“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.”

Emerson wrote Concord Hymn in 1836 for the dedication of the Obelisk, a battle monument in Concord, Massachusetts that commemorated the contributions of area citizens at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, April 19 1775, the first battle of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4 1776. Emerson’s grandfather was at the bridge on the day of the battle; their family home, The Old Manse, was next to the bridge; and Emerson is known to have written the hymn while living there. And in 1837, the hymn was sung during Concord’s Fourth of July celebration to one of the greatest tunes ever composed: the Old Hundredth.

America and the World Revolution, OUP, 1962

Alexandrias

Some cities founded or renamed by Alexander, or renamed soon after his death:

Alexandria Cebrene, a name for Cebrene, an ancient city in the Troad in northwest Anatolia. Has also been called Antiochia in Troad.

Alexandria Troas, on the north Aegean coast of Anatolia, in the modern province of Çanakkale.

Alexandria on the Latmos, referring to the Latmos mountain ridge, may have been a name for the ancient Alinda, in Caria in Anatolia.

Alexandria, Egypt. It had previously been a small town, Rhakotis.

Iskandariya, Iraq. On the Euphrates, about 25 miles south of Baghdad (which is on the Tigris).

Alexandria Asiana, Iran (where?)

Alexandria in Ariana, Afghanistan. Modern Herat, northwestern Afghanistan. Ariana was the name of a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire.

Alexandria in Arachosia, Afghanistan. Now Kandahar/Qandahar (a contraction of Iskandahar). Ancient Arachosia corresponds to south-eastern Afghanistan, as well as parts of Pakistan and India. The Helmand River runs through it, towards Iran, and provides the most fertile lands in southern Afghanistan. Kandahar is the largest city. Arachosia was directly to the south of Bactria, but separated from it by the Hindu Kush. It was bound on the south by Gedrosia (now Baluchistan), on the west by Drangiana (now Seistan) and on the east by the Indus river. An ancient Indo-Iranic tribe inhabiting northwest Arachosia, the Pactyans (or Pakthas of the Rig Veda), were probably the ancestors of the modern Pathans or Pakhtuns.

Alexandria of the Caucasus, Afghanistan, in the Hindu Kush. Modern Begrám in Parwan province: see last post. In the country known to the Greeks as the Paropanisadae.

Alexandria on the Oxus, Afghanistan. Modern Ai-Khanoum in Kunduz province, northeastern Afghanistan.

Alexandria Eschate, “the Farthest”, Tajikistan. Modern Khujand. In the southwestern part of the Fergana Valley, on the southern bank of the Jaxartes.

Alexandria Bucephalous, Punjab, Pakistan, on the Jhelum River, which was known to the Greeks as the Hydaspes. Named after Alexander’s horse Bucephalus, who died there after the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC. Nearby was another Alexandrian foundation, Nicea.

Alexandria on the Indus, Pakistan. Modern Uch. At the junction of the Indus and Acesines (modern Chenab).

Here is another map (from www.afghanforums.com), which refers to places mentioned in this post and in others since June 26. Punjab means Five Rivers, and you can clearly see the five tributaries and sub-tributaries of the Indus; from west to east: Jhelum (Hydaspes), Chenab (Acesines), Ravi (Hydraotes), Beas (Hyphasis) and Sutlej (Hesidros). The Beas, the shortest, is a tributary of the Sutlej.