A Study of History, Vol. 1: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI New Ed Edition

Hard to imagine grasping the drift of contemporary events without the overview provided by this Toynbee study. Toynbee worked on this 12 volume study from the mid-1920's to the late 1940's. His interest has been to gather together the recorded evidence of all the civilizations, of which he forms his study of the 20 plus civilations that he is able to identify. He admits that this is too few to reach scientific conclusions. He makes some interesting observations however: great civilizations are germinated from almost impossible challenges that are successfully mounted. Success of course produces new challenges. These challenges produce responses and on average he finds that there is a pattern of 3 such successful challenges before the civilization goes into decline. The downside of civilizations has its own peculiar patterns of decline, some of which have lasted for a 1000 years or more. This section may be of particular interest to students of contemporary events. Many are curious if western civilization is in decline as suggested by Oswald Spengler Decline of the West. Whether it is or not, the current political division concerning Making America Great Again is a revival of old nationalism that is resisting A One World View of history. By the way, for those who want a shorter study there is an abridge version of two volumes by Somervell also called A Study of History. As an appendix, this version has a section called "The Argument" that gives the impatient reader a summary of all of Toynbee's points in just a few pages.

I ordered this set of books from one of my favorite historians. This set explores causes of how civilizations come into being, and causes of their eventual demise. (Just like our own American experience happening now.)

This is an important, relevant and interesting book, but tediously written, sometimes -many times- smelling to religious partisanship and even pedantic in numerous occasions, but still a reading that must be done if you are an history geek. At least some of his views and intuitions has sense and are deep, but many others does not resist modern historic research.

Animal domestication was not an act of violence, but a phenomenon of mutual advantage. It was the hunter to domesticate the dog. Then, with the advent of agriculture bovines and other wild ruminants got advantages coming near the cultivated fields. The residuals of the production of wheat were for them a delicious alimentary source. And so in the Neolithic after agriculture herding was born. And also cats came near man perceiving advantages: the cultivated field attracts rats; and at their turn they draw the feline predator (A study of history, III volume, 1933). As a natural carnivore who needs vegetal products too, man differentiates his behaviour towards domestic animals and he recognizes special protections only to some companion animals. But in this stage of scientific development experimentation also on the animal species dearest to us seems unavoidable . Anthropocentrism belongs to scientific deontology.

This is a book that should not be missing from the personal library of anyone interested in macro-history. A pleasure to read; full of relevant illustrations; wonderful synthesis by the author himself (and a collaborator) of the monumental many-volume initial series.

I thought this was a bit thick and his style is indirect so you had to slog through a lot to get to the point. I'm sure it's brilliant, but I would not call it lucid or accessible.

I'll keep this simple. This is a lot of information, but for someone who is really into history it is a lot of fun to go through. This illustrated edition is great. I think anyone interested in history will absolutely love this book.

A lot of back-list books that make it onto Kindle contain obvious typos, presumably because the OCR software gets confused when publishers scan them in. This edition is worse than most, and gets progressively worse as you go on. This is especially confusing because Toybee liked to sprinkle in foreign words and archaic spellings. It is ironic that, these days, the free public domain e-books tend to be well edited by volunteers, whereas with the ones you pay for, the publishers apparently can't afford to hire a copy editor. This is the reason I didn't give this edition 5 stars.The work itself is brilliant. This book has stimulated me more than any I've read in months (and I read about a book a week). I know that Toynbee's theories are deprecated by modern historians, but they make sense to me. Anyway, I wonder how much of that prejudice is due to political and ideological leanings in most university social science departments, at least here in the US. Toynbee was unashamedly Christian and had some extremely disparaging things to say about Karl Marx. In my experience, that is enough to get you blackballed in some academic circles.The real reason to read Toynbee, though, is not his impact (or lack thereof) on the historical discipline. His real contribution has been on six decades of fiction, particularly speculative fiction. It is hard to overstate how much he influenced Isac Asimov, Arther C. Clarke, Pohl Anderson, and hundreds of others up to the present day. Now that I have just read Toynbee and received the ideas from the source, it gives me a new depth of appreciation for these authors.

Author is very well informed and there is also elements of philosophy and religious history within the book. Reader must really concentrate as text can involve moving from one time and/or geographical location to another often within one paragraph to the next. I followed the main thrust of the book and the general framework is as follows.Man forms civilisations as he rises to environmental challenges to particular geographical locations. Once a civilisation is formed societal institutions such as political, religious and legal establishments arise. This society can grow as creative elements, individually, or collectively, such as the Italians during their Renaissance can lead and evolve their societal culture by mimesis. Internal and/or external pressures can then influence the nature of a society. External pressures include assimilation to another polity or war being waged upon the said society by barbarian war lords. Internal pressures can be the penalisation of a group of peoples such as the Jewish (who subsequently underwent a Diaspora) or the Christians in Rome.Finally civilisations can then suffer disintegration as forces such as revolution (e.g. in France), political or social decay (such as in Rome or Egypt), or civil war (in Hellenic Greece) take place.I found the book to take the reader to a new depth in the study of history, and while heavy going in places it was accessible. I hope others can take as much from the book as I did

Book is quite expensive, but worth the buy.

Toynbee write in a similar manner to me, so I find his works easy to read. This book is an abridged version of his complete works of "A Study of History". Thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from one of the masters of history education.

Si la thèse de l'église universelle et des "prolétariats intérieurs et extérieurs" me paraît peu convaincante, la richesse de l'analyse, la hauteur de vue et le caractère éminemment transverse et global de la réflexion d'Arnold Toynbee font de ce livre un monument de la pensée humaine. Rien de moins!

habe lange nach diesem Buch gesucht. Sehr viel Geschichte in einer flüssig lesbaren, komprimierten Version. Sehr empfehlenswert, Dazu gibt es auch ein zweites Teil davon