Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (64 page)

Today there are many competing theories designed to explain the ‘collapse of the West’ in 1989-90. Was it the excessive growth of public spending and debt and the monetary laxity of the decades after Vietnam? Or was it the consequence of a fundamentally political division between Britain and the Americas - the legacy, perhaps, of the German occupation of England fifty years before? Yet, as the debates continue, it is easy to forget that, at the time, no one expected anything so dramatic to happen. Most supposed ‘experts’ on the Anglo-American system were simply astonished at the speed with which the transatlantic confederation disintegrated in the 1990s. First, the American states declared their independence from Stuart rule. Then what seemed to be a chain reaction severed the historic links between England, Ireland, Scotland and even Wales.

Those who had been looking forward to celebrating four centuries of Stuart rule (in 2003) could only reflect bitterly on the unpredictable - even chaotic - quality of great historical events.

In Moscow, by contrast, the collapse of the West merely seemed to confirm the validity of the deterministic theory of history so dear to Tsar Joseph and his heirs.

1
For an analysis of the appeal of these imagined alternative worlds, see Thomas Pavel,
Fictional Worlds
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

2
Robert Musil,
The Man without Qualities
, vol. I, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London, 1983), p. 12.

3
E. H. Carr,
What Is History
? (2nd edn, London, 1987).

4
Carr,
What Is
History?, pp. 44f., 90, 96, 105.

5
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory’, in
idem
,
The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
(London, 1978), p. 300.

6
Benedetto Croce, “Necessity” in History‘, in
Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays
, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London/New York/Toronto, 1966), pp. 557ff. Croce glosses over the possibility that it might in fact be easier for an historian to ask a counterfactual question about the past than about his own life.

7
Michael Oakeshott,
Experience and its Modes
(Cambridge, 1933), pp. 128-45.

8
Robert Harris,
Fatherland
(London, 1992). The idea of a German victory has inspired many less successful works, e.g. Philip K. Dick,
The Man in the High Castle
(New York, 1962); Gregory Benford and Martine Greenberg (eds),
Hitler Victorious: Eleven Stories of the German Victory in World War Two
(London, 1988); Peter Tsouras,
Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944
(London, 1994).

9
Kingsley Amis,
The Alteration
(London, 1976). A similar Catholic utopia is imagined in Keith Roberts,
Pavane
(London, 1968). Not surprisingly, there have been comparable fictions based on a Southern victory in the American Civil War: Ward Moore,
Bring the Jubilee
(New York, 1953); Harry Turtledove,
The Guns of the South
(New York, 1992). Less well known to English readers are two fantasies based on a Republican victory in the Spanish Civil War: Fernando Diaz-Plaja,
El desfile de la victoria
(Barcelona, 1976); Jesus Torbado,
En el dia de hoy
(Barcelona, 1976). I am grateful to Dr Brendan Simms for these references.

10
To cite a few egregious examples of the genre: H. G. Wells,
The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolutions
(London, 1933); R. C. Churchill,
A Short History of the Future
(London, 1955); Sir John Hackett,
The Third World War: The Untold Story
(London, 1982); William Clark,
Cataclysm: The North-South Conflict
(London, 1984); Peter Jay and Michael Stewart,
Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy, 1989-2000
(London, 1987); James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg,
The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990s
(London, 1992).

11
Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London, 1994 edn), vol. V (ch. lii), p. 445.

12
Charles Renouvier,
Uchronie (l’utopie dans l‘bistoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du developpement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n‘a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être
(1st edn, Paris, 1876; 2nd edn, Paris, 1901), p. iii.

13
Renouvier dedicated the book ‘to new partisans of human liberty, as it really was, in the past that it made’. ‘Our primary salvation’, he declared, ‘is to decide for ourselves’;
ibid
., p. 31.

14
G. M. Trevelyan, ‘If Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo’, in
Clio, a Muse and Other Essays
(London, 1930), pp. 124-35. For a more recent French riposte, see Robert Aron,
Victoire à Waterloo
(Paris, 1968).

15
J. C. Squire (ed.),
If It Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History
(London/New York/Toronto, 1932).

16
For a pro-Lincoln counterfactual see Lloyd Lewis, ‘If Lincoln Had Lived’, in M. Llewellyn Raney, Lloyd Lewis, Carl Sandburg and William E. Dodd,
If Lincoln Had Lived: Addresses
(Chicago, 1935), pp. 16-35.

17
A list of reported legislation conveys the flavour of the piece: ‘Compulsory Employment Act’, ‘Bill for the Censorship of Comic Newspapers’ and ‘Bill for the Dissolution of the City Companies’. While these conjure up a faintly droll vision of a Sovietised Britain, modern readers may find less unfamiliar such notions - which doubtless struck Knox as equally surreal - as a ‘Bill Setting a Maximum Wage for Company Directors,’ a surplus milk lake and a ‘rationalisation of the universities’ to replace Greats at Oxford with Engineering.

18
D. Snowman (ed.),
If I Had Been ... Ten Historical Fantasies
(London, 1979).

19
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall
, vol. VI (ch. lxiv), p. 341.

20
Winston Churchill,
The World Crisis: The Aftermath
(London, 1929), p. 386.

21
William Dray,
Laws and Explanation in History
(Oxford, 1957), p. 103.

22
Bertrand Russell, ‘Dialectical Materialism’, in Patrick Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
(Glencoe, Illinois/London, 1959), pp. 294f.

23
J. M. Merriman (ed.),
For Want of a Horse: Chance and Humour in History
(Lexington, Mass., 1984). In fact, only about half of the essays are genuinely counterfactual.

24
Conrad Russell, ‘The Catholic Wind’, in
ibid
., pp. 103-7.

25
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘History and Imagination’, in Valerie Pearl, Blair Worden and Hugh Lloyd-Jones (eds),
History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper
(London, 1981), pp. 356-69. The same lecture contains a more modern counterfactual setting out the ‘four hypothetical accidents’ which could have made a German victory in Western Europe ‘final’ after 1940: if there had been no Churchill; if there had been no Ultra intelligence; if Franco had joined the Axis; and if Mussolini had not launched his invasion of Greece.

26
John Vincent,
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History
(London, 1995), pp. 39f. See also his discussion of counterfactuals on pp. 45ff.

27
See in general R. W. Fogel, ‘The New Economic History: Its Findings and Methods’,
Economic History Review
, 2nd series, 19 (1966), pp. 642-51; E. H. Hunt, ‘The New Economic History’,
History
, 53, 177 (1968), pp. 3-13.

28
R. W. Fogel,
Railways and American Economic Growth: Essays in Interpretative Econometric History
(Baltimore, 1964). For an application of the same methods to the British case, see G. R. Hawke,
Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales 1840-1870
(Oxford, 1970).

29
See in general R. Floud and D. N. McCloskey,
The Economic History of Britain since 1700
(2nd edn, Cambridge, 1994), vol. II.

30
G. R. Elton and R. W. Fogel,
Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History
(New Haven, 1983).

31
R. W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman,
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
(Boston, 1974); R. W. Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
(New York, 1989). See for an opposing view H. G. Gutman,
Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of ‘Time on the Cross
’ (London, 1975).

32
For a summary of the ‘Borchardt debate’, see J. Baron von Kruedener (ed.),
Economic Policy and Political Collapse: The Weimar Republic
,
1924-1933
(New York/Oxford/Munich, 1990).

33
Geoffrey Hawthorn’s seminal
Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences
(Cambridge, 1991).

34
Ibid
., pp. 81-122.

35
Ibid
., pp. 123-56.

36
Ibid
., pp. 1ff., 10f.

37
R. F. Foster,
Modern Ireland
,
1600-1972
(Oxford, 1988).

38
John Charmley,
Churchill: The End of Glory
(Dunton Green, 1993).

39
Herbert Butterfield,
The Origins of History
, ed. Adam Watson (London, 1981), pp. 200f.

40
Lucretius,
On the Nature of the Universe
, trans. R. E. Latham (revised edn, Harmondsworth, 1994), pp. 64f.

41
Ibid
., p. 66.

42
Polybius,
The Rise of the Roman Empire
, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 41, 44. My emphasis.

43
Tacitus,
The Histories
, trans. Kenneth Wellesley (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 17.

44
Butterfield,
Origins
, p. 125.

45
Ecclesiastes I: 5-9. Cf. Stephen Jay Gould,
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
(London, 1987).

46
Butterfield,
Origins
, p. 207.

47
Ibid
., pp. 176-80.

48
Quoted in Ernest Nagel, ‘Determinism in History’, in William Dray (ed.),
Philosophical Analysis and History
(New York/London, 1966), p. 380. My emphasis.

49
Giambattista Vico, ‘The New Science’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 18f.

50
Pieter Geyl and Arnold Toynbee, ‘Can We Know the Pattern of the Past? - A Debate’, in Gardiner (ed.), T
heories of History
, pp. 308ff. On Toynbee’s
A Study of History
see Arthur Marwick,
The Nature of History
(3rd edn, London, 1989), pp. 287f.

51
Pierre Simon de Laplace,
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
, trans. F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory (New York, 1902), p. 4.

52
Ian Hacking,
The Taming of Chance
(Cambridge, 1990), p. 14.

53
Butterfield,
Origins
, p. 135.

54
Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1784), in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 22f., 29.

55
Michael Stanford,
A Companion to the Study of History
(Oxford, 1994), p. 62.

56
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Second Draft: The Philosophical History of the World’ (1830), in
idem, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History
(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 26-30.

57
Ibid
., pp. 33-141.

58
Auguste Comte, ‘The Positive Philosophy and the Study of Society’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, p. 75.

59
Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Concept of Scientific History’, in Dray (ed.),
Philosophical Analysis
, p. 28.

60
John Stuart Mill, ‘Elucidations of the Science of History’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 96-9, 104f.

61
Quoted in Fritz Stern (ed.),
The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present
(London, 1970), pp. 121ff., 127-32.

62
Henry Thomas Buckle, ‘History and the Operation of Universal Laws’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 114f.

63
Tolstoy,
War and Peace
, vol. II (London, 1978), pp. 1400-44.

64
See in general M. Rader,
Marx’s Interpretation of History
(Oxford, 1979).

65
Karl Marx,
Capital
, vol. I, ch. 32.

66
Carr,
What Is History
?, p. 101.

67
P. Abrams, ‘History, Sociology, Historical Sociology’,
Past and Present
, 87 (1980), p. 15. See also Rader,
Marx’s
Interpretation, pp. 4, 8f.; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory’, in
idem
(ed.),
The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
(London, 1978), p. 307.

68
Georgi Plekhanov, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 144-63.

69
Stanford,
Companion
, p. 284. For a similar allusion to Darwin by Trotsky, see Carr,
What Is History
?, p. 102: ‘In the language of biology, one might say that the historical law is realised through the natural selection of accidents.’

70
Herbert Butterfield,
The Whig Interpretation of History
(London, 1931).

71
Lord Acton, ‘Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History’, in W. H. McNeill (ed.),
Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History
(Chicago, 1967), pp. 300-59. My emphasis.