So Ductile Is History in the Hands of Man!

In 1783, weeks after a peace treaty ends the Revolutionary War, Britain invades the independent United States. The British navy blockades the Eastern seaboard, cutting off American trade routes, and the army launches a ground invasion. The French government, deep in debt from aiding the Thirteen Colonies, cannot provide support to the Americans. Does the newly formed nation survive? 

This question has generated considerable discussion on the Reddit forum “HistoryWhatIf.” In one scenario suggested there, royalist supporters in the South welcome the return of imperial rule and the Southern states rejoin the British Empire, leading to the early abolition of slavery in the North. In another, the British invasion is quickly repelled by hardened Continental Army troops, who annex Canada to the United States. It’s but one of thousands of counterfactuals that have been debated since the forum’s creation in 2014. Popular topics have ranged from the distant past (“What if the Romans had integrated Jesus Christ into the imperial pantheon?”) to the very recent (“If Trump buys the Buffalo Bills in 2014, how does the franchise fare afterwards?”). The forum’s most popular post (“What if Mitt Romney had won in 2012 instead of Obama?”) attracted thousands of comments. Questions related to World War II, the Civil War, American elections, and 9/11 usually garner the most attention. 

“HistoryWhatIf” has 165,000 members who discuss around ten new counterfactual situations each day, inviting others to weigh in on alternate timelines. The genre is alive and well in other corners of Reddit as well, including “HistoricalWhatIf,” created in 2011, and “AlternateHistory,” created in 2010, where contributors submit detailed alternate historical timelines that they have concocted on their own, often including made-up maps and fake Wikipedia pages. 

But these forums are not the most popular place for history on Reddit. “AskHistorians” has more than 2 million members and is devoted to providing detailed, serious answers to questions about the past. “What if” questions are explicitly not allowed. A member of the subreddit can request a comparison of Soviet and German military strength during World War II, but cannot ask if the USSR could have beaten the Nazis without assistance. In a post about the rule, a moderator explained that the forum is intended to provide factual answers about the past that can be supported by historical evidence, not to encourage speculative debate. 

One point of commonality between “HistoryWhatIf” and “AskHistorians” is a prohibition on questions and speculation about events that occurred within the last 20 years. The rule was instituted at “AskHistorians” in an attempt to prevent political arguments about events with more emotional valence, and “HistoryWhatIf” followed suit last year. Moderators there had noticed an uptick in the use of counterfactuals to speculate on the future. Questions such as “How could the United States fall into a dictatorship?” or “Would Obama have defeated Trump in 2016?” were resulting in partisan debate about the upcoming 2024 election. As a moderator with the username Sarlax implored, “We have plenty of places to argue with each other about modern events, but not so many places where we can ask important questions like, ‘What if Neanderthals colonized Antarctica?’ or ‘What if the Pirate Queen Zheng Yi Sao established a dynasty?’” 

This rule change reflects a perennial concern about counterfactual exercises: they serve people’s existing prejudices. A counterfactual, inherently designed to subvert and change the facts of history, can be bent to fit someone’s vision of what should have happened in the past and what should happen today, propping up a particular ideology. As noted on “AskHistorians,” without a common set of assumptions and ground rules, counterfactuals can quickly devolve into historical fantasies.

Academic historians are famously wary of counterfactuals. Scholars interested in how societies and cultures evolve over time tend to see counterfactuals as a reduction of complex events to either/or alternatives. For them, pretending that Germany won World War II or that the Soviet Union had never fallen ignores the deep, gradual levers of historical change. (E.P. Thompson notably called counterfactuals “Geschichtswissenschlopff” or “unhistorical shit.”) 

In his 2013 book Altered Pasts, the British historian Richard J. Evans writes that there are just too many historical variables to account for to create a serious alternate history. He suggests that as scenarios progress from their original starting point, they “enter the worlds of alternative reality to which increasing numbers of people are turning in search of spaces for their imaginations to roam free, unfettered by facts.” The proponents of counterfactual history, to Evans, are looking for comfort during times of political and cultural anxiety. 

Evans is especially critical of those who suggest that, if not for a few mistakes in the past, we might have had a different, happier future. Chief among his targets is the historian Niall Ferguson, whose 1997 collection Virtual History and 1998 book The Pity of War make the case that if Britain had allowed Germany to win World War I, the British government could have prevented the rise of authoritarian fascism and communism, and the British Empire would have survived through the 20th century. A few years later, Ferguson used the counterfactual question “How would the world be different if the British Empire never existed?” as the basis for his bestselling 2003 defense of imperialism, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. 

Ferguson became well known in the 1990s and 2000s for championing the role of chance and individual decisions in human history, writing that “the search for universal laws of history is futile” and that speculative history “is a necessary antidote to determinism.” His conservative politics and unconventional methods helped to make his approach especially unpopular within the academy. More recently, however, some scholars have suggested that we may be misjudging the counterfactual based on its modern misuses. 

For many centuries, historians set out to reveal an underlying divine purpose to human events. Counterfactuals were not a regular part of the historians’ toolkit because all history was seen as predetermined. In The History of Rome, Livy briefly pondered whether Alexander the Great, if he had turned his armies west, could have conquered Italy and destroyed the burgeoning Roman Empire. He concluded that, while Alexander was undoubtedly a brilliant general, the Romans had more than enough brilliant generals to repulse him. Livy’s point was to highlight the strength of the Roman military, rather than to speculate on how the world might have changed. 

During the Enlightenment, more writers began to seriously consider the role of human agency and chance in determining the course of events. The literary critic Catherine Gallagher suggests in her 2018 study Telling It Like It Wasn’t that the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz disturbed the determinist view of human history through his work on probability. He proposed that every event has an infinite number of other possible outcomes. According to Leibniz, God sees all these outcomes and chooses the best ones for humanity. This line of thinking invited speculation on other, unrealized, possibilities. The idea that a small change could have stunning consequences famously inspired the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal to muse that the length of Cleopatra’s nose had shaped the course of human history. 

In the early 1790s, British writer Isaac D’Israeli wrote one of the first extended discussions of counterfactual history, “Of a History of Events Which Have Not Happened.” D’Israeli, father of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, included the essay in the 1823 edition of Curiosities of Literature, a popular compilation of his biographical, literary, and historical treatises. D’Israeli opens the piece by reflecting on why Protestants and Catholics both believe history is unfolding according to their God’s will, and that setbacks, such as the conquest of Catholic Spain by the Umayyads, are victories in disguise, proving that God is ultimately on their side. 

D’Israeli argues that the outcomes we see as predestined often hinge on a single event. Although the Battle of Tours ended with Charles Martel’s victory over the Umayyads, the Muslim armies had a stronger force. They could have successfully conquered France and the rest of Europe. D’Israeli imagines an alternate future in Muslim-ruled Britain where “we should have worn turbans, combed our beards instead of shaving them, have beheld a more magnificent architecture than the Grecian.” His point is that events only seem inevitable because they have already happened. When the outcomes are reversed, it’s harder to see the past as predetermined. D’Israeli notes, for instance, that the Protestant Reformation might have been avoided if the Catholic Church had not formally censured Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Luther, this argument goes, might have been willing to compromise, but after being publicly insulted, his sense of personal pride would not allow him to return to the Church. 

D’Israeli concludes that our explanations of history change as the times change and no single outcome is ever preordained. Counterfactuals, for him, allow us to hold multiple possible outcomes in our minds at once: 

So ductile is history in the hands of man! and so peculiarly does it bend to the force of success, and warp with the warmth of prosperity! … We shall enlarge our conception of the nature of human events, and gather some useful instruction in our historical reading by pausing at intervals; contemplating, for a moment, on certain events which have not happened!

Whereas counterfactuals are often seen today as a tool for propping up political arguments, D’Israeli regarded their use as expressly apolitical: a method for ensuring that a historian remained open-minded. If you could imagine alternative outcomes as plausible, you wouldn’t be tied to a particular account about how history was destined to unfold. 

If counterfactuals were for 18th-century thinkers primarily philosophical exercises, 19th-century military historians used them to understand complex conflicts between European empires — and, in what would become a historical parlor game across centuries, to evaluate Napoleon’s failures and successes. In the 1832 volume On War, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz wrote that to assess a commander’s decisions, a historian cannot limit their thinking to what the commander actually did: they must master “the full extent of everything that has happened, or might have happened.” Clausewitz challenged the tendency to smooth history into straightforward narratives: “A great many assumptions have to be made about things that did not actually happen but seemed possible, and that, therefore, cannot be left out of account.” According to Clausewitz, one needs to examine a historical event from all possible individual and collective viewpoints, with the understanding that multiple decisions may have been correct according to different perspectives. 

The Napoleonic Wars inspired several speculative histories that imagined Napoleon winning rather than losing. The first full-length one, Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy-Chateau’s 1836 Napoléon et la conquête du monde (“Napoleon and the Conquest of the World”), described Napoleon triumphing over Russia and England to rule all of Europe. In 1854, two years after Napoleon III was declared emperor of France, Joseph Méry’s novella Histoire de ce qui n’est pas arrivé (“A History of What Never Happened”) imagined the first emperor driving his armies across Asia to conquer British-ruled India. Gallagher contrasts the work of theorists like Clausewitz, who explored infinite historical possibilities, with alternate-history writers who changed one event to create a new, more glorious future. Geoffroy-Chateau and Méry’s works were reprinted several times during the Second French Empire, resonating with royalist supporters who wanted to see France once again become a dominant power in Europe. 

In the 20th and 21st centuries, alternate histories in the style of Geoffroy-Chateau and Méry became more prevalent than the sort of counterfactual analysis practiced by Clausewitz. The fall of Nazism in World War II was the defining “what if” of 20th-century alternate history, with British and American writers, notably Noël Coward, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Harris, exploring dystopian possibilities stemming from an Axis victory. The imagined victory of the Confederacy in the American Civil War was another popular subject. Whereas Geoffroy-Chateau and Méry had turned to alternate history to sketch out a more glorious future for France, Anglophone writers used it to explore darker divergent timelines. This work reflected anxieties about the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, the dissolution of European empires, and technological changes. 

Gallagher suggests that the critics of counterfactual history have conflated counterfactual analysis with alternate history writing. While Niall Ferguson might reimagine a chain of events to prove a political point, early speculative thinkers like D’Israeli and Clausewitz used counterfactuals to challenge prejudices and simplistic thinking about the past. D’Israeli was more interested in exploring events that hadn’t happened than in using counterfactuals to show what should happen. Clausewitz demonstrated that no conceivable historical outcome can be taken as more likely than others: all historical events, he argued, exist within many possible timelines. The work of these writers established that no past result can ever be proved to have been certain. 

This approach to counterfactual history has been embraced by Gallagher and the prominent military historians Jeremy Black and Geoffrey Parker. While counterfactual history might still be infrequently practiced in the academy, their work has received positive attention from scholars. More historians are finding counterfactuals to be a useful tool for disrupting assumptions about the past, and for untangling why certain events did or did not happen. In the 2006 collection Unmaking the West, scholars considered how Western European colonial expansion might have been prevented by certain events playing out differently. What, for instance would have happened if the Chinese invented the first steam engine, or William of Orange didn’t assume the English throne? The purpose of this exercise was to reevaluate the inevitability of Western dominance and explore other unrealized outcomes.

Whether or not academic historians approve of them, counterfactual and alternate histories continue to proliferate on bookshelves and internet discussion boards. Sites like “HistoryWhatIf” demonstrate that there is a widespread interest in using “what if” questions to learn more about the past (“What if the United States didn’t pursue the Truman Doctrine?”) and to entertain (“If you gave the emperors of Rome the cheapest burger from McDonald’s, would they think it’s delicious?”). Many counterfactual exercises, unquestionably, serve to reinforce specific political programs. But versions of the form that truly engage with alternate possibilities can also unsettle what we think we know. 

On “AskHistorians,” a user recently wondered if there is any academic value to counterfactual history. One commentor noted, “Many of the core questions people, including historians, have about history are either implicitly or explicitly counterfactual.” Another redditor, after analyzing the benefits and limitations of the practice, concluded: “Honestly, it’s just a lot of fun.”