Research in a global context: a discussion of Toynbee's legacy
Arnold Toynbee was Director of Studies at Chatham House from 1924 until his retirement in 1954. His fame rests on two monumental projects to establish a global perspective. The Annual Survey each year reviewed the world as a geographical whole, selecting four or five themes for special treatment. It was not an edited volume. The Study of History put Western civilization in the context of a historical survey of all previous civilizations. Quite apart from his considerable journalistic output, the thirty-four volumes of the Survey and the ten volumes of the Study show how seriously Toynbee had taken a schoolmaster's injunction ‘first to see your subject or your problem as a whole’. Toynbee believed that a global perspective in terms of both time and space was of practical use.