Counterfactual history

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Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a form of history which attempts to answer "what if" questions known as counterfactuals. It seeks to explore history and historical processes from the point of view of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different to that which did in fact occur. Most historians regard counterfactual history as sometimes entertaining, but not meeting the standards of mainstream historical research due to its speculative nature. Advocates of counterfactual history often respond that all statements about causality in history contain implicit counterfactual claims - for example, the claim that a certain military decision helped a country win a war presumes that if that decision had not been made, the war would have been less likely to be won, or would have been dragged out longer.

It should be noted that counterfactual history is most emphatically not revisionist history, nor should it be confused with the genre of alternate history fiction. In general, the main distinguishing feature of counterfactual history from fictional alternate histories is that counterfactual history attempts to provide reasoned arguments for each change, and the changes are usually outlined only in broad terms, whereas a fiction writer is free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history. The line is sometimes blurred as historians may invent more detailed timelines as illustrations of their ideas about the types of changes that might have occurred, but it is usually clear what general types of consequences the author thinks it is reasonable to suppose would have been likely to occur, and what specific details are included in an imagined timeline only for illustrative purposes.

Although there are Victorian examples of counterfactual history, it was not until the 20th century that the exploration of counterfactuals in history was to begin in earnest. An early example is If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931) which features a contribution by Winston Churchill who examined what would have happened had Robert E. Lee won at the Battle of Gettysburg.[1] Although this volume is notable for featuring imagined histories by serious historians, the histories are presented in narrative form (in most cases with a fairly whimsical tone) without any straightfaced analysis of the reasoning behind these scenarios, so they fall short of modern standards for serious counterfactual history and are closer to the fictional alternate history genre.

A significant foray into treating counterfactual scenarios seriously was made by the economic historian Robert Fogel, who in his 1964 book Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History tried to use quantitative methods to imagine what the U.S. economy would have been like in 1890 if there were no railroads.[2] Few further attempts to bring counterfactual history into the world of academia were made until the 1991 publication of Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences by the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Hawthorne, who carefully explored three different counterfactual scenarios.[3] This work helped inspire Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), a collection of essays exploring different scenarios by a number of historians, edited by the historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson has become a significant advocate of counterfactual history, using counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to deterministic theories of history such as Marxism, and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly different modern world.

[edit] References

James C. Bresnahan (ed.): Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counterfactual Scenarios, ISBN 0-7864-2392-7
Robert Cowley (ed.): What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 0-425-17642-8; Pan ISBN 0-330-48724-8
Robert Cowley (ed.): More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Pan, ISBN 0-330-48725-6; Berkley Publishing Group ISBN 0-425-18613-X
Robert Cowley (ed.): What If? America: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ISBN 0-330-42729-6
Niall Ferguson (ed.): Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ISBN 0-330-35132-X; ISBN 0-465-02323-1; ISBN 0-330-41303-1
Geoffrey Hawthorne: Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, ISBN 0-521-40359-6; ISBN 0-521-45776-9
Roger L. Ransom: The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been, ISBN 0-393-05967-7; ISBN 0-393-32911-9
Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (eds.): Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, ISBN 0-691-02792-7; ISBN 0-691-02791-9
Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker (eds.): Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History, ISBN 0-472-11543-X, ISBN 0-472-03143-0