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”.
This book, edited by Niall Ferguson, was first published in 1997 and is now available in paperback just as counterfactual history is undergoing a resurgence; another recent book, The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, edited by veteran biographer Francis Beckett, looks at what might have happened if Neil Kinnock or Norman Tebbit had made it to 10 Downing Street.
Ferguson got leading historians to speculate on England without Cromwell, America without a revolution in the 18th century, the First World War without British involvement, the enactment of Home Rule in Ireland in 1912, a German invasion of Britain in May, 1940, a Nazi Germany defeat of the Soviet Union, no Cold War, no assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963 and 1989 without Gorbachev.
The result is a mixture of styles, tones and quality with caveats emphasising that some historians are uncomfortable with the exercise despite agreeing to take on the counterfactual challenge. While some are po-faced, others are whimsical and irreverent and enjoying themselves.
Ferguson’s introduction, nearly 100 pages, is multi-layered, dense, occasionally pompous and far too long and indulgent; it amounts to a well-researched but overwrought review of the history of the counterfactual as elucidated by novelists and historians. A notable popular success was the 1992 novel Fatherland, by Robert Harris, a detective story set in an imaginary Europe 20 years after a Nazi victory; but as far back as 1907, GM Trevelyan, the literary Edwardian historian, wrote an essay entitled “If Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo.” Much of what was published in the 20th century amounted to “brilliantly formulated counterfactual questions, not answers,” while many authors left the counterfactual “implicit as a kind of subtext,” writes Ferguson.
What dominated historical writing was a belief in historical determinism, but Ferguson highlights what he sees as the mistaken assumption that the present was the only possible end point of the historian’s narrative because when events are happening the end is unknown. Ferguson says there are complex philosophical ramifications of the counterfactual; that there is “no real point in asking most of the possible counterfactual questions”; what is needed is plausibility in the formation of the counterfactual question in the sense of possibilities that seemed probable. This is an essential point, but there are so many health warnings that one wonders why Ferguson bothered at all — at times, he seems desperate to convince himself of the merits of what he is doing, but he suggests, rightly, that we should consider as plausible or possible “only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered.”
What of the rest of the essays, which are labelled “separate voyages into imaginary time”? In looking at the possibility of England without Cromwell, John Adamson’s essay observes that in 1639 the possibility of a royal victory for King Charles I was real and plausible. Triumph might have offered him the opportunity to realise his ambition of imperial unity between the three kingdoms, but it would be naive to assume opposition to his policies would have been extinguished with royal victory in 1639.
Alvin Jackson’s thoughtful exploration of home rule being enacted in 1912 suggests Ireland in the 1920s might not have been that different; it would have remained a dominion loosely bound to the British empire and the revolutionary nationalist tradition would not have died in a home rule Ireland, “but it is possible that, having a much less clear focus, it would have had less popular acceptance.” Nonetheless, British Liberals steering through home rule in 1912 might have happened “at the price of a delayed apocalypse.”
What if Britain had stood aside from war in 1914? Ferguson suggests that it was convenient for politicians to claim that World War I was so awesome it was beyond their power to prevent it, but there was a substantial body of liberal politicians that opposed a public military commitment to France. There is the possibility that Germany’s first bid for European union, which would have involved it dominating a customs union, could have been accommodated or caused a shorter and less catastrophic war.
Andrew Roberts looks at the possible consequences of a German invasion of Britain in May, 1940 and concludes, “Britons would have behaved no differently than other defeated peoples.”
Jonathan Haslam asks if the Cold War could have been avoided and refuses to play ball with the counterfactual, having said at the outset that he is “a convinced sceptic” of posing such questions.
Haslam says that the Cold War was inevitable because regardless of the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, differences would have arisen between the allies over Germany.
The reflections of Diane Kunz on Kennedy living beyond 1963 are amusingly scathing, blunt and dismissive of the Kennedy myth: “Fairy stories are necessary for children. Historians ought to know better. JFK was a mediocre president.” She says Vietnam policy would not have changed and Kennedy “at heart was not committed to civil rights” in a way that Lyndon Johnson was, so Kennedy’s assassination was “not a tragedy for the course of American history.”
There is much to entertain in this book; the standard of most of the essays is high and there is a fluency of style from the more authoritative contributors; it will also infuriate some who have attachments to particular theories or a sense of the inevitability about major turning points in world history.
But there is the feeling that since not everyone who contributed an essay is convinced of the veracity of the project or the counterfactual, we are being sold a pup. Collectively, these essays do inspire reflection and questioning of a healthy kind, but they do not represent a ringing endorsement of the counterfactual concept.
Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD
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