Toynbee treats technology in its basic sense as the practical use of tools, then asks which kinds of tools matter when societies compete for power. His examples include machinery, transport and weapons, all of which can increase a state’s economic or military capacity. Technology therefore matters not simply because it improves practical life, but because it can alter relationships of power between societies.

In the surrounding passage, however, Toynbee deliberately extends the idea of a tool beyond material technology. Beliefs and political creeds can also serve as instruments of power because they mobilise people, shape loyalties and influence societies beyond national borders. He uses Soviet communism after 1917 as his example, arguing that an ideology could compete with the West’s material advantages. The wider point is that power depends on more than machinery: ideas themselves can become potent instruments in political and civilisational competition.

Full quotation

“Technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools; and we have to ask ourselves: What are the tools that count in this competition in the use of tools as means to power? A power-loom or a locomotive is obviously a tool for this purpose, as well as a gun, an aeroplane, or a bomb. But all tools are not of the material kind; there are spiritual tools as well, and these are the most potent that Man has made. A creed, for instance, can be a tool; and, in the new round in the competition between Russia and the West that began in 1917, the Russians this time threw into their scale of the balances a creed [communism] that weighed as heavily against their Western competitors’ material tools.”