Making history: academics ask ‘what if world events had ended differently?’
POSING the ‘what if’? question as counterfactual history divides historians. EP Thompson said it was “unhistorical shit”. EH Carr said it was a “parlour game” and a “red herring,” as “history is a record of what people did, not what they failed to do”.
Hugh Trevor Roper articulated a contrary view in 1981. He said “history is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened”; a definition elaborated on by Irish historian Joe Lee who said “to understand what might have happened one has to have a historical sense about potential alternatives over a longer period”.
