Dakin: The first one: when Chamberlain resigned as prime minister in 1940, Churchill wasn’t the first choice; Halifax was generally more acceptable. But on the afternoon when the decision was taken, Halifax chose to go to the dentist. If Halifax had had better teeth, we might have lost the war.
[. . .]
Montgomery took over the Eighth Army before Alamein, but he wasn’t the first choice. Churchill had appointed General Gott. Gott was flying home to London in an unescorted plane when, purely by chance, a lost German fighter spotted his plane and shot him down. So it was Montgomery who took over, seeing this afterwards, of course, as the hand of God.Irwin: That’s brilliant. First class.
Dakin: It’s a good game.
Irwin: It’s more than a game. Thinking about what might have happened alerts you to the consequences of what did.
Dakin: It’s subjunctive history.
(Excerpt from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys*)
If history is the study of things that happened in the past, then what do we call the study of things that did not happen? Is ‘counterfactual history’ merely an outrageous oxymoron designed to provoke the votaries of the ‘science of res gestae’ (Collingwood)? Meaningless exercises in ‘what-iffery’?
Around the time that modern historians and philosophers of history were engaged in defining the historical method, the earliest forays into the realm of counterfactual history had already begun. Even as Benedetto Croce famously banished the conditional tense from the precincts of history, his contemporary G. M. Trevelyan wrote a prize-winning essay titled ‘If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo’ (1907), prophetically anticipating the central preoccupation of the counterfactual method: what if Hitler had won the Second World War? In 1931, J. C. Squire published a collection of essays titled If It Had Happened Otherwise, featuring, among others, an essay on the American Civil War by Winston Churchill, another perennial favourite of subjunctive historians. But it could be argued that the origins of the genre are as old as history itself. From Tacitus’s musings on ‘What if the Pisos Ruled Rome’, to Machiavelli’s wistful digressions on Cesare Borgia’s missteps, to Gibbon’s speculation on a Saracen victory over the Franks, have not speculation and suggestion always been cornerstones of the historian’s craft?
The speculative method really came into its own in the second half of the century, building to a crescendo in the last twenty years. Scholars such as Philip Tetlock, Aaron Belkin, Niall Ferguson, and Catherine Gallagher have sought to define the epistemic boundaries of what is, in effect, neither fact nor, properly speaking, fiction. Gallagher (2018) rigorously distinguishes between ‘alternate history’ (a series of counterfactual events leading to the creation of a sustained fictional world), ‘alternate historical’ fiction (with invented characters), and the more rigid ‘counterfactual history’, which, to varying degrees, adheres to the ceteris paribus rule; that is, it imagines the possible worlds created by the variation of one or a few factors, all other things remaining unchanged.
In this series, we are primarily interested in this third kind of subjunctive history: what is the point of such enquiries, and what are its pitfalls? Does it even merit the label of history? And, when we willingly suspend the clarity of hindsight in order to immerse ourselves in the chaos of the past, do we emerge as better readers of history?
Of note, too, is the curious alliance between conservative, right-wing politics and counterfactual history. From Squire to Churchill to Ferguson, its practitioners range from fascist to racist to conservative. On the other hand, Marxist historians such as E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson have been dismissive of speculative history. Why are thinkers most invested in envisaging alternate futures so vehemently opposed to ‘what-iffing’ the past? And conversely, what are the stakes for the political right in imagining other historical realities?
Reading List
Bartolovich, Crystal. ‘History after the End of History: Critical Counterfactualism and Revolution’. New Formations, no. 59 (2006): 63–80.
Bowler, Peter J. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World Without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Bunzl, Martin. ‘Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide’. The American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 845–858.
Eire, Carlos M. N. ‘The Quest for a Counterfactual Jesus: Imagining the West without the Cross’. In Unmaking the West: ‘What-If?’ Scenarios That Rewrite World History, edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, 119–144. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Gallagher, Catherine. Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Levy, Jack S. ‘Counterfactuals, Causal Inference, and Historical Analysis’. Security Studies 24, no. 3 (2015): 378–402.