Toynbee and the “Armenian Question”: Political Pragmatics, Moral Principles, Personal Motives

The role of A.J. Toynbee in exposing the mass extermination of the Armenian population by the Ottoman troops and paramilitaries during the First World War is relatively well described in the contemporary historiography.It is generally recognized that it was he who collected and analyzed the basic data for Lord J. Bryce's famous speech in the House of Lords on October 6, 1915 and so-called "Blue Book" published later.Much less attention was paid to Toynbee's personal motives and the circumstances that led to his active participation in this campaign, as well as its direct and indirect consequences -both personally for Toynbee and in terms of forming moral and legal assessments of crimes against humanity.In particular, historians have not fully explained the fact that shortly after the First World War and under the impression of what he saw during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, Toynbee took a consistent pro-Turkish position, at bottom placing all responsibility for ethnic cleansing on the Greek side and keeping silent about such excesses of the Kemalists.Also, contemporary "Toynbee studies" don't give a convincing explanation for the fact that later the historian not only didn't abandon this interpretation in his memoirs, but, moreover, transferred the apology of the Turkish side to the events of 1915-1916, disavowing his previous assessments and recognizing the mistake of participating in the Bryce's investigation, since it was not objective and was dictated solely by propaganda purposes.The paper's author attempts, based on a comprehensive analysis of ego documents and other sources, to identify the cause-and-effect relationships between these two pages of Toynbee's biography, analyzing the motives and circumstances that prompted him to participate in the investigation of Lord J. Bryce, as well as a set of reasons that led to the subsequent revision of assessments of the events of 1915-1916.