About book Virtual History: Alternatives And Counterfactuals (2000)
Historical counterfactuals are fun to ponder: What if John Wilkes Booth had had poor aim? What if Hitler hadn't declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor? What if Napoleon had escaped to South America in a tiny submarine after Waterloo? Niall Ferguson wants to go even further. Alternative histories aren't just amusing, he argues in the introduction to this collection of essays. They're actually a useful way to study history. They can help us think through whether certain historical events—Germany's defeat in World War II, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or civil rights in America—were actually inevitable or whether they were dependent on small choices and turning points that could have just as easily gone the other way.After finishing the book, I'm still a little skeptical of this broader claim. Yes, it's important to consider counterfactuals (it's hard to make claims about causation without thinking about counterfactuals, at least implicitly). But I'm less convinced that it's necessary to spin out elaborate alternative histories to answer hard historical questions.Take World War II. In one of the more readable essays in this book, Andrew Roberts argues that Germany could have very plausibly conquered Britain in 1940. Imagine if Hitler hadn't given his famous halt order and had instead allowed the Wehrmact to kill or capture the 40,000 British troops at Dunkirk. And so on...Well, okay. Lots of historians have mulled that question—it's hardly new. What Roberts is adding here are pages gaming out the consequences of that fateful decision. If Britain had fallen in 1940, the nation wouldn't have been around to attack Italy in Libya in 1941. Then maybe Hitler wouldn't have had to waste time bailing out Mussolini and could have launched his invasion of Russia a month earlier, before winter set in. Hitler might have won the whole war.There are smaller questions to consider, too. The British Royal Family would have fled in this situation, but where to? Roberts digs up some evidence that Franklin Roosevelt wouldn't have let the royals settle in Ottawa, their first choice, for fear of stoking anti-monarchical sentiment in Congress. King George VI might have had to settle for a government-in-exile in Bermuda.There's also the question of collaboration. Would the British people have acquiesced to German occupation the way the French did? Roberts desperately wants the answer here to be "no," and compiles as much evidence as possible that the British were united in opposition to fascism, unlike the French. (He dismisses the point that the British Channel Islands were fairly willing collaborators after being conquered by Germany in 1940 by noting that most of those inhabitants spoke French, anyway.)That brings us to the big question: What's the value in this exercise? One possibility is that it's entertaining, sure. Second is that it helps us appreciate the fact that the events of World War II were hardly inevitable. Third is that it can help adjudicate debates like, "Was French collaborationism really so vile? Wouldn't anyone have done what they did in a similar position?" Fourth is that alternate history is a nice organizing structure for discussing overlooked historical details (like the bit about the royals in Ottawa).Most of the essays in this book do a mix of #2 and #4. Mark Almond's essay trying to imagine 1989 without Gorbachev argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was hardly inevitable—but was a result of specific, and deeply idiosyncratic, choices made by Gorbachev. Diane Kunz's essay on "What if John F. Kennedy had lived?" is helpful for its evidence that JFK was just as committed to the Vietnam war as Lyndon Johnson.But are detailed alternative histories necessary for making points like those? I'm not convinced. Are these essays always as rigorous as normal history tries to be? Probably not. Are they at least interesting? Sure, most of them. (The first three are a bit confusing if you don't know British history very well.) So I guess I can see why so many historians prefer to stick to what's known and are dismissive of this genre. That said, I'm sticking with my line that counterfactual histories are certainly fun to ponder.
This took a long time to read. The introduction does more than sets the scene; it's an entire essay on various different approaches to history and the philosophical implications of these different approaches. It is also a justification for the essays in the book to break free of the deterministic nature of most historical writing and analysis... It's enlightening (for someone who's never studied history 'academically') but astoundingly dull.Neil does his best to establish a space for the worthy academic contributors to create a series of interesting essays looking at what might have happened 'if'. To identifying the crux points of the past and explore alternative consequences. I can imagine him publishing this essay in a colourless journal, having tea with some friendly professors who ply him with compliments before approaching his greedy publishers. Neil mails copies of his essay to identified contributors, all experts in their field who jump on board despite a few misgivings as to the premise of the intended book.After completing the tiring intro the reader is eager to jump into the meat of the book and the first contribution.It sets the scene for the rest of the book and disappoints greatly. It is not an enjoyable ride through an informed fictional past but an opportunity for the writer to layout the scenario as it actually happened in the manner of a dry précis of actual events. Worthy academic references, nods to other professors, faint self-congratulation and dazzlingly erudition (for those that know the period well). There might be time to include a paragraph or two at the end that outlines what might have happened 'if' and for the author to admit to not subscribing to the idea that academics should entertain such childish notions as 'counterfactual history'.The dull essays continue and a two star review seems imminent. The essay on the 'Irish' problem is the nadir. If I knew more about the history of this issue I'm sure I would have enjoyed the authors research and insights into the events that occurred better. But I didn't.Then we reach the First World War and the writing picks up, the events become more pertinent to modern day concerns and I knew more about the period. The essays follow the same format but there's better documentary evidence of proposed alternative plans. The Germans can be relied upon to make excellently well documented plans to cover all conte cites and this obviously helps the academics immensely. If the first half of the book was missing this would have been a five star review but it balances out at four.Back to Neil; the contributors essay disappoint. Academics are at universities for a reason - they don't write good fiction. Neil tries to lift the game with a spirited afterword playing with alternatives in a scenario that seems doggedly 'deterministic', in terms of events if not the players, until he gains enough confidence to plot the decline of the western world. Fun. I liked it. But too late.Those good essays from the halfway point were great because they were great history essays. They were not 'conterfactual' they described very interesting documentary evidence with some good analysis.A good book with a bad title.
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I will write only about the 90 or so page introduction to this volume by the editor, Niall Ferguson, which I began by reading assiduously and ended by skimming quickly. Counterfactual history is history written mainly in counterfactuals – sentences of the form “if x had/had not been the case, then y would/would not have been the case.” (Obviously, most sentences in such a history might not actually be counterfactuals, but the main theses will be.) Of such historical endeavors, four questions must be asked, and it is surely the main job of an introduction to a volume of essays of counterfactual history to state these questions and discuss the possible answers to them. a) Which counterfactual suppositions (the “if” parts of counterfactuals) make interesting counterfactual history? There is not much interest in wondering what things might have been like had Lincoln been a Martian spy or had Chamberlain mooned Hitler in Munich. b) Are counterfactuals capable of being true or false? And if so, what makes one true and another false, and how might we determine their truth or falsity? c) If the answer to b) is no, then by what standard do we assess the value of a counterfactual? Interest? Plausibility? Verisimilitude? And d), how do we operationalize a measure of whatever answer we give to c)?Ferguson does address a). His answer is that we should restrict ourselves to suppositions that were seen as possible by the people to whom they pertain. If Chamberlain really did consider mooning Hitler, then the supposition that he did would be a permissible one by this criterion for counterfactual historicizing. Presumably, it never crossed Chamberlain’s mind and would not have been seen by anyone then as a likely course of events, so in fact it would not be a good basis for counterfactual historicizing. Ferguson’s answer successfully serves to exclude some worthless suppositions, but probably excludes too much. Perhaps no-one in Britain during the Industrial Revolution worried about an end to the supply of iron; but it might be interesting to think about what might have happened had iron become unavailable.About the remaining issues, Ferguson, as far as I can tell, says nothing whatsoever, essentially rendering his introduction irrelevant to the essays that follow. What he does do is to give a whistle-stop tour of philosophies of history, particularly focusing on issues of determinism. It seems plausible that one’s views on determinism might have some impact on one’s views on counterfactual history. But what that impact might or should be is far from evident. One could be a determinist, in the strictest, Laplacean sense and hold a variety of views about the answers to a) to d) above. If Ferguson wanted to dwell on determinism in the philosophy of history in this context, this is what he should have attempted to articulate.I was amazed that no mention at all was made of the work of David Lewis, who has provided the most sustained philosophical treatment of counterfactuals in existence. Lewis certainly has things to say that bear on questions a) to d). And I noted some pretty shoddy summary of Hume that makes me question the quality of his descriptions of other figures. Finally, he mentions Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland and says that the possibility of a German win in WWII also inspired several “less successful” novels, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle! In what counterfactual universe is Dick’s novel less successful than Harris’s (though I don’t disparage the latter at all)?
—Simon
It's understandable that counterfactual historical speculations have been more popular with fiction writers than historians, as their handling by the latter has all too often lurched toward the simplistic and absurd. Indeed, too many of them--Robert Fogel's tome on what 19th century American development would have been like without railroads--have reminded me of nothing so much as an early "Saturday Night Live" skit which featured a "film" of the Battle of Hastings showing William the Conquerer's decisive employment of a modern battle tank against his adversaries. Thankfully, Niall Ferguson's skillfully edited collection of historical speculations mainly avoids the pitfalls and outright silliness so often found in the perilous counterfactual genre. Most of the questions asked and speculatively answered here are the obvious ones: What if Hitler had invaded Europe? What if the American Revolution had been suppressed? What if JFK had not been assassinated? What if Britain had decided not to enter World War I on the side of the Entente? What if there had been no Cold War? Or, allowing that, what if Communism had not disintegrated in 1989? Not to mention some queries of perhaps greater interest to the British scholars who wrote most of the essays here, such as: "What if King Charles I's 1639 expedition against the Scots had succeeded? What if Irish Home Rule had finally been passed on the third try in 1912? Readers may not find all of the topics here equally fascinating but all are treated soberly and, for the most part, with impressive erudition. And not the least of this book's pleasures are editor Ferguson's introductory essay on the value of counterfactual history and his most Afterword, a very amusing blending and send-up of all of his contributors' thoughts. Very well done, often very funny, and Ferguson's own essay on British entry into World War I is a must-read.
—John Bellamy
This one is just straight up awful. By this book Niall Ferguson's descent into ridiculousness is complete (although it is only edited by him). It's extremely arrogant and far reaching in its attempt. I will be honest in saying that that is what attracted me to picking this book up from the shelves. However it spectacularly fails to deliver on its premise in ways far too hilarious for me to document here - see Amazon for some good takes. Pankaj Mishra's LRB review of "Civilization" also comes to mind.
—Arjun Narayan
