The Mediterranean as a Theater of Cross-cultural Encounters in Toynbee's Approach to World History

Paper proposal accepted at the Fourteenth Annual World History Association Conference, Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco, June 27-29, 2005. Recent literature on global historiography shows a growing, but still inadequate recognition of the crucial role played by “contacts between civilizations in space”, i.e. cultural interaction, in A. Toynbee's rethinking of the Spenglerian notion of Weltgeschichte as a series of unrelated life cycles of high cultures. His study of civilizations, while pursuing a comparative assessment of the laws regulating their inner dynamics (nomothetic approach), was also heavily indebted to the ancient model of narrative treatment of universal history embodied in the works of Eduard Meyer, who depicted the history of antiquity as a process of gradual unification of the Mediterranean world through the spreading and thickening of the web connecting state-systems and cultural areas formerly living in isolation (oecumenical approach). Toynbee's accounts of Mediterranean history largely concentrated on world-historical outcomes of ancient and modern encounters between East and West, such as the birth and cross-cultural diffusion of higher religions, providing his overall vision of the evolution of humanity with a major unifying thread. Focusing on Toynbee's analysis of interactions between civilizations of the second and third generation taking place in the Mediterranean basin, as recorded not only in his magnum opus but also in his more specialized historical works, the paper aims both to offer a critical evaluation of his theory of the cultural contact and to locate the specific function given to the Mediterranean experience in his philosophy of history.