This page is about the economic historian Arnold Toynbee; for the universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee see this article. For other persons named Toynbee and related topics see the disambiguation page Toynbee.
Toynbee was born in London as the son of the physician Joseph Toynbee, a pioneering otolaryngologist in his time; the more famous universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), with whom he is often confused, was his nephew. Toynbee attended public schools in Blackheath and Woolwich. In 1873 he began to study political economy at Oxford, first at Pembroke College and from 1875 at Balliol College, where he went on to teach after his graduation in 1878. His lectures on the history of the Industrial Revolution in 18th and 19th century Britain proved widely influential; in fact, Toynbee coined, or at least effectively popularised, the term "Industrial Revolution" in the Anglophone world—in Germany and elsewhere it had been brought into circulation earlier by Friedrich Engels, also under the impression of the industrial changes in Britain. Toynbee died at age 30 in 1883, after his health had rapidly deteriorated probably due to exhaustion by excessive work.
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