Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in London in 1889 and studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught at King’s College London and later became a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics. He also worked on international affairs, including service for the British Foreign Office during the First World War and at the Paris Peace Conference.

Toynbee spent much of his career at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, later known as Chatham House, where he served as Director of Studies. He sought to understand history through comparisons between civilisations, examining their growth, breakdown and interaction while challenging accounts of world history centred primarily on Europe.

Toynbee became an internationally prominent historian and public intellectual, but his standing among professional historians declined from the 1950s. Critics argued that his large historical patterns relied too heavily on selected examples, religious ideas, analogies and myths, sometimes allowing an overarching philosophy of history to shape his treatment of the evidence. Later scholars have also recognised him as an early advocate of a less Eurocentric approach to world history.