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“China has a more promising chance of shepherding mankind into political unity than any other country,” wrote Britain’s most famous historian in 1974. Arnold Toynbee, historian and prognosticator, was once famous enough to appear on the cover of Time magazine in 1947, but he is almost unheard of in the West today. Yet his legacy lives on in Asia, where Zhang Guangzhi of Fudan University’s history department can recall Toynbee rising from obscurity to acclaim as the greatest modern historian. Today, Zhang is one of dozens of scholars working to translate the entirety of Toynbee’s 3-million-word magnum opus, A Study of History, into Chinese.

Toynbee, born in 1889, came of age as World War I transformed the philosophy of history. Pessimism came to dominate a field once marked by attempts, like those of Hegel and Marx, to track mankind’s ascent from barbarism towards liberation. The German polymath Oswald Spengler offered the first volley with his two-volume Decline of the West, first published in 1918. For Spengler, civilizations resemble organisms; they are born, they live, they die.

“China has a more promising chance of shepherding mankind into political unity than any other country,” wrote Britain’s most famous historian in 1974. Arnold Toynbee, historian and prognosticator, was once famous enough to appear on the cover of Time magazine in 1947, but he is almost unheard of in the West today. Yet his legacy lives on in Asia, where Zhang Guangzhi of Fudan University’s history department can recall Toynbee rising from obscurity to acclaim as the greatest modern historian. Today, Zhang is one of dozens of scholars working to translate the entirety of Toynbee’s 3-million-word magnum opus, A Study of History, into Chinese.

Toynbee, born in 1889, came of age as World War I transformed the philosophy of history. Pessimism came to dominate a field once marked by attempts, like those of Hegel and Marx, to track mankind’s ascent from barbarism towards liberation. The German polymath Oswald Spengler offered the first volley with his two-volume Decline of the West, first published in 1918. For Spengler, civilizations resemble organisms; they are born, they live, they die.

Before Spengler’s work was translated into English, it was reviewed for the Times of London by Toynbee, fluent in German. A classicist by training, Toynbee grew to question Western historical narratives during his time as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference and a correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish War. In both cases, he felt the British public misunderstood the legitimate grievances of the colonized. By age 33, Toynbee was director of studies at Chatham House, Britain’s premier international relations institute, where he stayed for three decades.

Years later, Toynbee remembered that he “wondered at first whether my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler.” Spengler’s account of cycles of advanced cultures categorically rejected any notion of Eurocentrism. He elevated civilizations from Mesoamerica to China, ridiculed by 19th century imperialist historiography, to the same level as anything Europe had produced. But Toynbee soon realized that his project was distinct. Spengler’s differentiation of civilizations was so radical that he jousted at windmills to separate every fragment from culture to culture, even arguing that mathematics was a relative construct.

Toynbee’s alternative came with his A Study of History, published in 12 hefty volumes between 1934 and 1961. The 7,000-page work made Toynbee a household name, particularly after an abridgement sold at least 300,000 copies. While the idea of transnational civilizations remained at its core, it featured more sociology than Spengler’s quasi-mysticism. In place of iron laws........

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