Counterfactual history

Development

An early collection of counterfactual histories, If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), included a piece by Winston Churchill imagining a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. The volume's tone was whimsical and offered neither historical analysis nor logical grounding for its scenarios. In Railroads and American Economic Growth, Robert Fogel used quantitative methods to hypothesize the U.S. economy of 1890 without railroads, concluding that expanded canals and improved roads would have made the railroad's absence negligible, delaying per capita income by only a few months.

Few academic efforts followed until Geoffrey Hawthorn's Plausible Worlds (1991) examined three counterfactual scenarios. This work helped inspire Virtual History (1997), edited by Niall Ferguson, who became a prominent advocate, using counterfactuals to challenge deterministic theories like Marxism and to argue for the role of contingency in history. A series of What If? books edited by Robert Cowley presented essays by historians on how small changes at decisive moments could have altered history.

Criticism

Most historians consider counterfactual history entertaining but not rigorous scholarship due to its speculative nature. Advocates respond that causal claims in history inherently involve counterfactual assumptions. Richard Evans critiques the approach as often driven by right-wing wishful thinking that oversimplifies complex causation. Christopher Prendergast argues counterfactuals can test explanations of historical causality. Aviezer Tucker rejects multi-causal counterfactuals, insisting each should assume all other conditions remain equal.