Revisiting the Crossroads of History

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, by Niall Ferguson. Boulder, CO: Basic Books, 1999. 560 pp. $30.

"What if" questions have long been taboo in the academic world, especially in Niall Ferguson's discipline, History. Yet, as he points out in his dynamic historiographical introduction, they have often been implicit in the works of major historians, whether in the form of Gibbons' ironical aside suggesting that the Koran might have been taught at Oxford had Charles Martel lost to the Saracens in 733, or in Carr's reluctant question of how different matters might have been in the Soviet Union had Lenin not died when he did. Later historians have been less chary of asking what the alternative possibilities were in any given event, chiefly, in Marc Bloch's words, to test the rigor of their analyses. Yet, few have posited the alternative as a subject for exploration in and of itself, that is, to ask what might have been if x had happened rather than y.

These are questions that might be more appropriate for the political scientist to ask, and are relatively legitimate in the analysis of current affairs. Policy analysts frequently criticize policymakers for taking the wrong decision given their options. Ferguson has a case worth making when he asks why, then, historians often treat choices as determined or inevitable, or dismiss the alternatives as deserving of little notice, simply because they were not chosen.

To underline the fortuitous nature of many of the twentieth century's most influential events, in Virtual History Ferguson brings together a group of historians to ask what might have happened if Charles I had avoided the English Civil War; if there had been no American Revolution; if Ireland had not been partitioned; if Britain had not entered the First World War; if Germany had invaded Britain and defeated the Soviet Union in the Second World War; if the Cold War had been avoided; if John F. Kennedy had lived; and if communism had not collapsed. The authors are careful to establish the feasibility of their counterfactuals by showing that not only were the questions they ask carefully considered by contemporaries, but that in many cases the choice was a close call. Only Diane Kunz and Mark Almond divagate from this endeavor, the former because her question ("What If John F. Kennedy Had Lived?") does not pertain to choice, and the latter because he argues that Gorbachev and his advisors were largely unaware of the options that they had.

Careful as they are to establish the feasibility of their counterfactuals, the contributors to this volume are divided over the extent to which it is feasible to posit the alternative as a subject of inquiry in and of itself, as opposed to a hypothesis against which they can sharpen an explanation of actual events. For example, Jonathan Haslam provides substantive evidence to show that Stalin carefully considered a division of Europe into spheres of influence along the more laissez-faire lines of the Monroe Doctrine before choosing the more colonial option of establishing a sphere of influence through sovietizing East Central Europe. Stalin's eventual choice was based on a combination of off-key readings of U.S. military policy and readiness, and a selective use of the intelligence provided by the famous British spy team of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Cairncross. Given Stalin's shrewd pragmatism, it was far from inevitable that he should misinterpret the materials available to him; his choice was, therefore, unpredictably contingent. However, Haslam concludes, when it came to Germany, the weight of historical Russian grievances was likely to have disallowed pragmatism, and this in itself could have been sufficient to tilt events in the direction of the Cold War.

In Haslam's view, then, the importance of the "what if" question, and a historical description of the counterfactual, is to deepen the examination of events, not to suggest that the counterfactual might actually have led to a different sequence of events...