Making history: academics ask ‘what if world events had ended differently?’

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson. Penguin Books, £12.99.

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”.