Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

As Niall Ferguson makes clear in the lengthy and thoughtful introduction to this accessible and wellwritten collection, counterfactualism-“what-if’ history-has a major role to play in clarifying the extent to which history does not move in a smooth progression. Instead, it suggests and explores the possibility of other developments. Furthermore, like the essays in this volume, counterfactual studies display an explicit awareness of the role of the scholar as interpreter. This approach draws on the task of the historian in organizing material and asking questions, but takes it a stage further. As such, it is appropriate to add the authorial voice, rather like Henry Fielding in Tom Jones (1749). By so doing, the role of the scholar as organizer of questions-and Ferguson has arranged some fascinating onescan be made explicit, and the counterfactualism can be introduced in a helpful manner. This process also underlines a postmodernist dimension to counterfactualism, not that that is the sole philosophy/methodology that is at issue. However, a stress on postmodernism helps counter the charge that counterfactualists are primarily reactionaries who are reluctant to accept the process or results of change; Ferguson shows indeed that criticism of the approach has come from the Left, especially from Marxists, and those influenced by Marxism, such as E. P. Thompson. However, the question, What if? is very heuristic and should remain in dialogue with Why? and How? explanations, if those explanations are to be true to their historical moments. The reader is thus returned to the uncertainty of the past. This has the additional value of underlining the uncertainty of present and future. An interest in counterfactualism as a historical method can be linked to shifts in political thought-more explicitly to the revision of political traditions from Whiggish teleology and Marxist determinism to an accretion or cumulation of choices made from among contingencies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the revision in this volume is explicit. John Adamson suggests that Charles I could have avoided the Civil War and put an end of parliaments in England for decades. Jonathan Clark probes the possibility of a British America without U.S. independence; Alvin Jackson asks if Home Rule in 1912 could have worked. He concludes that the risks were great and that Ireland under Home Rule might have ended up as Britain’s Yugoslavia. Ferguson himself asks whether Britain could have stayed out of World War I, concluding that a triumphant Wilhelm I1 would have closed the options for Hitler. He ends: “By fighting Germany in 1914, Asquith, Grey and their colleagues helped ensure that, when Germany finally did achieve predominance on the Continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it”-an interesting insight (280). Andrew Roberts argues that Hitler could have invaded Britain successfully in 1940, and Michael Burleigh suggests that the Third Reich would have gone on after defeating Soviet Russia to attempt to dominate much of the world. The globalism of Hitler’s ambitions is emphasized. Jonathan Haslam thinks that the Cold War was inevitable because it was impossible to remove the ideological factor from international relations. Dianne Kunz suggests that assassination in Dallas preserved the Kennedy myth from failure at home and abroad, especially in Vietnam. She is very critical of attempts to offer a positive portrayal of Kennedy’s presidency and, more specifically, of Kennedy’s foreign policy and his approach to Vietnam. Mark Almond holds Gorbachev responsible for the fall of communism and argues that but for him the Eastern Bloc would have continued, and much of the West was happy to prop it up. In short, this is a series of stimulating contributions. However, this is also a somewhat disappointing volume. First, Ferguson, a very able historian, is surprisingly weak on the theory of his subject. It would be more appropriate, if less sensational, to begin with Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (eds.), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 1996). The reader would then be able to discuss how, as effects ramify through a system, so positive and negative “feedback loops” greatly complicate causal and counterfactual inference in history. Secondly, this is very much a Eurocentric account. It is necessary, however, both in theory and example, to address other cultures. For example, it is interesting to consider what would have happened had the