Turkey: A Past And A Future

by Arnold J. Toynbee

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: History, Politics

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Not the same as Arnold Toynbee, economist and nephew of Arnold Joseph Toynbee

British educator Arnold Joseph Toynbee noted cyclical patterns in the growth and decline of civilizations for his 12-volume Study of History (1934-1961).

He went to Winchester college and Balliol college, Oxford.

During both world wars, he worked for the foreign office. He additionally published Nationality and the War (1915), The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915), The German Terror in France: An Historical Record (1917), and Turkey, a Past and a Future (1917). He attended the peace conference of Paris in 1919 as a delegate.

From 1919 to 1924, Arnold J. Toynbee served as professor of modern Greek and Byzantine at King's college, London. From 1925, Oxford University Press published The Survey of International Affairs under the auspices of the royal institute of international affairs, and Toynbee, professor, oversaw the publication. From 1925, Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs. He published The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (1928).

His first marriage to Rosalind Murray produced three sons and ended in divorce in 1946. Toynbee, professor, then married Veronica M. Boulter, his research assistant. He published Civilization on Trial (1948).

Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs until 1955.
People published best known lectures of Toynbee, professor, in memory of Adam Gifford as An Historian's Approach to Religion (1956). His massive work examined development and decay. He presented the rise and fall rather than nation-states or ethnic groups. According to his analysis, the welfare depends on ability to deal successfully with challenges.

He also published Democracy in the Atomic Age (1957), Christianity among the Religions of the World (1958), and Between Niger and Nile (1965).

He died in York, North Yorkshire, England.

Reviews

[Nuruddin Azri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toynbee invites the readers to see on how the Germany's economic activity in Turkey is initially for the sake of power, not prosperity. For the sake of war, not for peace.

He then carves on how the Jews who originally came to Palestine as refugees but their number increase from 25 000 to 120 000 between 1881 to 1914. Then, they were financed by Baron Edmund de Rothschild from 1884 to 1899 and they discover the secrets of success – self-government and scientific methods.

During that time too, there was also Palestine Land Development Company which buys land in big estates and resells it in small lots to individual settlers. The first Jewish secondary school also was built in 1907 at Jaffa using Hebrew as the language of instruction.

Since then, the Jews cultivate their land which originally consist of only 2% from the entire Palestine Land. Though the size is small, their lands were the most fertile and active which end up with a high price of production and quality of land.

That is why the land and water is the most crucial things in the early period of history. Toynbee also adds by quoting from Herodotus on how Babylon in the fifth century B.C. was a great city and land. The walls were 300 feet high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad straight streets intersecting one another at regular intervals, at right angles or parrallel to the Euphrates.

[Windy2go · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this book off of Amazon.com when I first began to study Turkey, and my reason for choosing it was... I could download it to my Kindle for Free. So, while my efforts to exactly identify when it was written have failed (the Amazon hard copy says it was published in 2010), I suspect it was in the early 1950s. The book is very dated, written in a heavy academic style that presupposes a whole body of historical and regional knowledge I don't have, and it is sometimes surprisingly, I might even go so far as to say shockingly, politically incorrect. I would have given up reading it, but it was also very SHORT, and I found I was getting through it so quickly, that what I was able to gain was worth it.

Here's a hint at what you're in for via the very first two sentences of the book: "What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing, for no formula can embrace the variety of the countries marked "Ottoman" on the map: the High Yemen, with its monsoons and tropical cultivation; the tilted rim of the Hedjaz, one desert in a desert zone that stretches from the Sahara to Mongolia; the Mesopotamian rivers, breaking the desert with a strip of green; the pine-covered mountain terraces of Kurdistan, which gird in Mesopotamia as the hills of the North West Frontier of India gird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as the Pamirs, which feed Mesopotamia with their snows and send it the soil they cannot keep themselves; the Anatolian peninsula--an offshoot of Central Europe with its rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, but nursing a steppe in its heart more intractable than the...." oops. The page ended... but the sentence goes on. What are "the Pamirs" anyway?

A shockingly politically incorrect disparagement of the Turkish people came through loud and clear in a section about the Armenian persecutions. The book quotes a German teacher who taught in Aleppo and who resigned in protest in 1915. "The Young Turk is afraid of the Christian nationalities--Armenians, Syrians and Greeks--on account of their cultural and economic superiority... they must therefore be exterminated or converted to Islam by force. The Turks do not suspect that in so doing they are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting themselves.... The Turks, the least gifted of the races living in Turkey, are themselves only a minority of the population, and are still far behind the Arabs in culture....We teachers, who have been teaching Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, and Jews in German schools in Turkey for years, can only pass judgment that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the most unwilling and the least talented."

Whoa there. Imagine finding anything like that in a book written in the last twenty years! I wonder what said German teacher would say about that passage if he could be consulted today? As someone unfamiliar with Turkey and the Turks, I'm afraid I need to approach such dated opinions with caution. How interesting to read them in this dusty book!

A "German authority" is cited to back up some of these opinions: "The extermination of the Armenian population means not only the loss of from 10 to 25 per cent of the total population of Anatolia, but what is more serious, the elimination of those elements in the population which are most highly developed economically and have the greatest capacity for civilisation...."

The book did shed valuable light on the relationship between Turkey and Germany, which I vaguely knew existed and which I now understand better (though as the quote above demonstrates, I'll need to bring some other sources to bear before feeling confident about what I've learned). The author writes: "Germany's control over Turkey depends upon the maintenance of a corrupt minority in power--too weak and corrupt to remain in it without Germany's guarantee, and corrupt enough, when secured in it, to put it at Germany's disposal." He quotes a Dr. Rohrbach: "We have set beore ourselves the necessary and legiimate aim of spreading and enrooting German influence in Turkey, not only by military missions and the construciton of railways, but also by the establishment of intellectual relations, by the work of German Kultur--in a word, by moral conquests; and we are determined, by pacific means, to reach an amicable understanding with the Turks and the other nations in the Turkish Empire. Our ulterior object in this is to strenthen the Turkish Empire internally with the aid of German science, enducation, and training, and for this work the Armenians are indispensible."

Yet the author argues that because of Germany's dependence on controlling the Ottoman minority, which initiated the Armenian atrocities, the Germans would not intervene, allowing the masacres which they felt ruined the prosperity of the country becuase they were caught between a rock and a hard place in their own political machinations. Interesting insights.

So I give the book three stars. Hard to read. Maybe I'm just not smart enough. Might be worth revisiting when I've read other, more accessible histories of Turkey.

[Omar Taufik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not about the modern state we now know as "Turkey". It is a survey as mentioned by author written in the year 1917 on the Ottoman Empire - called Turkey by the author and Western writers in general- during the Great War and under the rule of the Young Turks government (Committee of Union and Progress). The lands and peoples described are from the territories that remained Ottoman by that year.
The author in good detail explains the evolution of Turkish nationalism as a survival ideology of the ruling government highlighting it's impact within the empire. He elaborates on the impact on non Muslim components with special emphasis on the Armenians and the different social, economic, political consequences of their mass deportation.
The Jewish question in Europe and the gradual early twentieth century settlement in the land of Palestine is explained with it's various historical, religious, economic and political aspects.
The author actually discussed and projected the future of various Ottoman lands and peoples. Such projections took place at the time the Ottoman Empire was still an existing state fighting a war along side of the Germans. This gives an indication the author and the general atmosphere in the Western Europe were anticipating the final loss and collapse of the Ottomans and Germans by that time.
The reader should not expect a warm tone from the author towards the Ottoman Empire. The author who is a very famous twentieth century British historian had no soft corner at all towards the Ottoman Empire and especially towards it's Turkish element, which I believe taken within the historical, cultural and political context would be of no surprise especially with the Great War in action at the time he wrote his book. I did read that the author did change his position against the Turks after the end of the war.
I believe this book derives it's value from it's timing of writing as a historical document including quotations from various various German and British officials and Turkish nationalism thinkers of the time, along with informative material about the various lands and peoples of the late Ottoman Empire.

[Raffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an interesting book about past and present Turkey, present meaning until the coming of the Young Turks (CUP) to power.
For those who are not familiar with the history of the Ottoman Empire and all the cultures and civilizations living within its vast Empire, will find it hard to comprehend and will need to first read an introductory book. The author condenses much of his information into tight-knit sentences and takes for granted that those who are reading this book are already familiar with all the various races, all the internal political aspirations, and the geopolitics of the region and the era.

I liked the book since it's not long and was written in a direct way, without any political correctness, to the extent that many modern readers will find some terms rather racist and undiplomatic.

[Tolga · Rating 2 out of 5]

An outsider living in Turkey expresses opinions impersonating as a Turkish expert because he lived there for a while. Not that bad, approximations and reflections of honest tries of immersion of culture exhibit themselves in a readable manner. I'd recommend reading it, but you'd need to pour good amount of salt on the political analysis and question all the claims instead of taking them in as facts - not that they are lies (I don't think they are), but incompleteness is likely to be the main culprit of half-correct conclusions.
As they say, this book is not bad, but having correct half the time is worth the read.

[BJ Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good short but obviously dated read. It was written before the conclusion of the Great War and gives an excellent contemporary understanding of the logic behind the Allied partition of the Middle East at the war's conclusion. It also gives a look into the Armenian genocide while that genocide was still taking place.

[Efruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that gives a objective point of view for the first years of Republic. Writer criticizes the reforms giving reasons, background and results in a constructive manner. Also, background information is provided by using the history of Ottoman Empire.

[Kimberly Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good introduction

Not enough information about ancient Turkey to lead into the difficulties of the time frame this was written. But it is a good read to get some good background information.

[M.feridun Aktaş · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read to understand the real, unbiased and in depth analysis of many actors and facts that are mostly not known or spoken much. A good insights for young Turkey.