Good History Needs Counterfactuals

March 2004 · Historically Speaking25 and ethnic groups a particular voice. The impact of PR or, for that matter, the existing electoral system, on social and economic developments is less clear. Such counterfactuals are notidle speculation . At any one moment, various developments seemed possible to people in the past, and the sole guarantee was that what was going to happen was not known. Contingency can also be extended to aspects ofhistory that are not usually tackled through the "what if approach. It is possible to consider different developments in public culture, arising , for example, from policies toward media regulation. In the case of the environment and transport, the consequences of more stringent restrictions on building on greenfield sites and ofheavier fuel prices invite consideration . This is notidle. Such options play a major role in economic modeling and social planning. To turn back from the present, comparative history also encourages a measure of counterfactualism. For example, the comparison ofChinese and Christian European government leads to the question of whether a particular type ofstate structure was necessary for the modernization seen in the West, an issue probed in recent scholarship. The Europeans might have possessed a system comparable to that in China had the fusion ofchurch and state developed differently, but a widespread disengagement of the church and clergy from state government tookplace in the early modern period. By fostering the impact of ideological goals on commercial practices and aspirations, such a fusion of church and state mightwell have limited economic growth in Europe. The pedagogical value ofcounterfactual approaches, handled carefully, was driven home to me when, at the age offourteen, we played the Congress ofVienna at high school (I was given the non-voting role ofTalleyrand on the basis that I was the sole pupil who knew anything about the subject) and had to close with an essay explainingwhy our terms were different from those actuallynegotiated. My research repeatedly underlines the extent of choice in foreign policy and the extent to which structural factors affected, but did not determine, these choices. This is linked to the issue ofhow far success and failure are inherent. It is reasonable to consider whether Louis XIV could have thwarted William IQ's plans in 1688 orwhethergreater effort could have sustained and strengthened the promising French positions in India and North America in the early 1750s. For geographical , cultural, and political reasons, France was different from Britain as an economy , a society, and a state, but these differences did notlead to inevitable consequences. I suspect that, as active researchers, there are, in practice, no major differences between Richard Evans and myself, but rather variations in emphasis that reflect our own specialties . Such pluralism is to be encouraged. Jeremy Black isprofessor ofhistory at the University ofExeter and has recentlypublished France and the Grand Tour (Palgrave , 2003), Italy and the Grand Tour (Yale University Press, 2003), andVisions ofthe World: A History ofMaps (MitchellBeazley, 2003). Good History Needs Counterfactuals Richard Ned Lebow Richard Evans is right on target in his criticism ofNiall Ferguson's simplistic and ideologically transparent use of counterfactuals. Ferguson's two books do a disservice to counterfactuals, which remain an essential—ifinadequately exploited—tool of historical and social scientific research. Robert Cowley's two volumes, by contrast , make no pretense aboutusing counterfactuals to do anything other than to alert readers to just how contingent the past really was. This is a useful exercise because the "hindsight bias"—one ofthe more robust and most heavilydocumented cognitive biases— leads us to overvalue the likelihood ofevents that have already occurred. Historical research reinforces this bias. R.H. Tawney observed that it gives "an appearance of inevitableness" to an existing order by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrustinginto the background those which were swallowed up.1 No matter how well documented or convincingly presented , historical studies invariably provoke critiques and contending interpretations. Decades—or centuries—ofcontroversy about such events as the French Revolution or the fall ofthe Roman Empire generate shelves of studies that attribute these developments to a wide range ofpolitical, economic, social, and intellectual causes. Discount a half-dozen putative causes and another half-dozen still remain. Historical debate encourages the beliefthat events like the...