Military planning 101 has lots of emphasis on "courses of action" (the formal field manualese term). IE it's important and essentially to analyze the potential courses of action for both you and the enemy, and guess what's the "most likely" and "most dangerous".
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Book Nook: If It Had Happened Otherwise
- Thread starter David Flin
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Military planning 101 has lots of emphasis on "courses of action" (the formal field manualese term). IE it's important and essentially to analyze the potential courses of action for both you and the enemy, and guess what's the "most likely" and "most dangerous".
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Counterfactual logic, I think, can be useful in determining the real importance of historical events - whether they were true inflection points of history, or something less important - by sketching in some general detail as to what would have happened if it had gone the other way. That said, it’s certainly true that what we’re doing on this site is only occasionally like that. In general, what we’re doing here really is just for fun - and it is fun.
Not a positive example those people suck. Inspiring some middle class brat to put "Syndicalist" onto their twitter bio or make a wikibox about Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás isn't the same as what Star Trek did. These people don't have a meaningful real world presence, in five or ten years those people will grow up and either be normal or have fallen deeper into meme politics which they probably already pretty sympathetic to
Well those books are written with a sense of "tee hee tee hee wouldn't that be a laugh ??" which is annoying but if you ask a historian "what if the communists won the 1948 Italian general election" they'll go "I don't know. Probably a coup and polarization between the pro and anti groups" which is an unsatisfying answer yeah but their field is real history that happened not what ifs . I don't think history books should include an aside about if Al Gore won in 2000 and how that would affect the middle east. I hope I don't seem like I'm putting historians on a pedestal or anything
That's not really counterfactuals in the same way as the book or this forum. Like I'm sure the Pentagon has contingency plans if Putin nukes Kiev or China invades Taiwan of If Ukraine pushes the Russians back five miles tomorrow but they're not counterfactuals in the way 'points of divergence' are.
Online AH, unlike Star Trek inspiring engineers/space scientists, Top Gun getting people to join the US Navy, or 101 Dalamatians leading people on mostly ill-conceived attempts to raise those dogs, is very insular. To use one of my metaphors, it doesn't have a handle for normal people to grab.
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There's a fairly intense debate about the extent to which the British public was actually all that interested in the Empire outside of moments of great fervour such as the death of Gordon. I do think it's a curious lacuna in that this was a post-war book that was published at a time when there was a very public debate about the Empire's future - to say nothing of the spectacle of several mighty empires having collapsed and been carved up.
(I really do enjoy Guedalla's Granada essay, which ends with a note that the Sultanate has been given the League of Nations Mandate for Spain....)
Good spot- my edition is from a later reprinting. Still, the note about the house style stands!
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I think the distinction is between 'counterfactuals are a parlour game,' and the implied' counterfactuals are nothing but a parlour game.'
An important historiographical note is that the Carr quotation comes from his book 'What is History' which is basically a series of historiographical lectures. I don't know a tremendous amount about Carr - he is decidedly out of my field. However, from what I've read my understanding is that he was a leftish scholar of the old school - his works are very well reviewed, but have also been criticised for being fundamentally teleological. All mankind inevitably advances towards a more progressive socialist future.
That was beginning to fall out of favour even in the sixties - I don't know, but I suspect that Carr's work was partly a response to younger scholars (on both the right and left) who were questioning the intellectual foundations of his project.
Carr doesn't just dismiss 'what if', he also plays down the role of chance and accident. In other words, his project is very hostile to the idea not just of entertaining historical alternatives, but of admitting their existence.
That being said, as I noted in the review he's not wrong that alternate history is often just light entertainment. I don't think it's worth fighting that- as you say, it's not about the hobby being smart or dumb, it's about it being a hobby. Stamp collecting is a hobby. I don't deny anyone's right to enjoy it, but I would raise an eyebrow at a person who claimed that partaking in stamp collecting necessarily was a statement of political and social activism.
The other extreme would be Niall Fergusson, who's a great believer in the use of counterfactuals to hone a historian's judgement. Speaking as a sometime historian, I agree that it can be a useful tool, but it takes a particular type of person to do what Fergusson did and publish a piece explaining that he'd revised his opinion on interwar appeasement because of his latest France game in Making History: The Calm and the Storm.
This is precisely it - counterfactuals are not a useful academic tool in and of themselves, they are a useful tool for checking our broader historical models. My supervisor used to have a habit of going through undergraduates' drafts and circling the word 'inevitable' in red pen every time it appears. He felt that too often it's a word we use in place of showing our thinking.
To use an example from my own work: I firmly believe that Imperial Federation was a mirage, a fantasy that never had any plausible chance to implementation in any of its many, many proposed forms.
But I also sought, in my doctorate, to show that too often scholars have taken its obvious failure for granted rather than taking it seriously as something that appeared to be a plausible (and desirable) future at the time, at least to certain groups of people. Because if you take it seriously - if you say, let us treat this as something that could actually be worked towards - than the actions and words of people in the 1880s-1900s can take on new light.
The other role is to check whether our assumptions about the causes of events hold up - so I've mentioned in passing that one of the lazy assumptions that makes my eyes roll is when people assume that if the Perry Expedition hadn't been launched Japan would have continued in isolation until the twentieth century. No. That's object blindness, assuming that nothing in the world is real until America acts upon it. Remove Perry and look at everything else that was already happening, and it's hard to see how you put off the major changes for another full decade let alone longer.
Granted, that might have been quite a consequential decade!
Yes.
To use an example dear to this site's heart - we all know that Sealion had no chance of success, but that was not a fact known to British high command in 1940. Alan Brooke's diaries are very clear that every time there was a gap of a day or two in the bombing, he was nervous that the Luftwaffe was taking a moment to regroup before launching the invasion.
We have to walk the line between writing in the knowledge of what we know to be possible - there was never going to be a successful invasion - and the epistemic humility that lets us truly understand how people at the time responded to events.
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Indeed. Arguably another ancestor of this field is the old British army essay, 'The Defence of Duffer's Drift' which is essentially Groundhog Day: South Africa, with a hapless subaltern getting his position overrun in new and painful ways every day until he works out the right sequence of orders to give.
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A belated correction: Evans was quoting Carr. Evans is sceptical of counterfactuals, rightly, but he actually put out perhaps the best academic volume on alternate history, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History which I should review for the blog sometime.
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- Visiting BWBs.
Which frequently comes about because of what the dear old Duke called "The Other Side of the Hill."
We get to see both sides of the board, as it were, as can evaluate chances and likelihood based on what each side actually had. By contrast, people at the time usually have to make guesses (educated, informed, or otherwise) about what the other side has, often based on very modest and potentially misleading data. A ship in harbour may be ready for action, or it may be an internal wreck with most systems non-operational and a crew who don't yet know port from the mainbrace.
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- Baselland
Nowadays he’d be an inventor of magic tricks and make regular appearances on QI
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An excellent summary.
I could have made the point that some of these figures are actually rather Edwardian - Belloc, Chesterton, and Churchill were very much pre-war figures in much of their outlook, and that surely shapes their writing here.
Another dreadful thought: this book in some way prefigures alternate history being done by Newt sodding Gingrich.
Your moral judgement of them is irrelevant, the point is that the influence is inarguable. It is very easy to dismiss this pipeline as 'meme politics' today, in the same way that Gladstone doing mass 'American-style' politics in the Midlothian campaign was dismissed as mere mob politics, politicians having radio interviews was crass commercialism, the Kennedy-Nixon TV debate was a grotesque betrayal of principled democracy, etc. etc. Beware the judgement of history. For better or for worse, pools of activists and backroom workers are presently filling up from this route into interest in politics, and it can only be a matter of time before the same is true of candidates themselves.
Of course, that is only politics; it is also true that a great number of people just on this forum alone have gone into academic history in part due to the influence of online AH.
Conversely I always on first glance mistakenly read the popular shortened version of Hobbes famous quote about life as being 'nasty, British, and short'.
This is frankly out of touch. It reminds me of how fandoms in the early 2010s would go “Obama plays Dungeons and Dragons. Makes you think twice about that nerd you bullied right ?” For one there’s a lot less people identifying as syndicalists or what have you now than there was in 2018 and two tell me a singular real world event that is because of Kaiserreich or TNO or like Fear and Loathing and Gumbo. If you really think that in twenty years congressmen are going to thank video games mods for getting them into politics or that Alternate History Dot Com will go down as one of the most historical sites ever because all the future politicians on it you’ve got your head in the clouds. Hell I would measure to guess the people here who have ran for office already had a deep interest in politics and history and that’s why they’re on this site. I’m saying “oh nothing that happens on the internet matters or affects the real world” but podcasts like Chapo Trap House(remember them?) deserve more credit for getting people active into politics than Kaiserreich and that’s just objectively true
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I loooooooooooove simulations, especially counterfactual/alternate ones[1]. While I could go on and on and on about the perils of wargaming/simulations, overall I think someone who tries to use empirical tools in a serious way is usually preferable to someone who doesn't. (This is another issue with Paradox games: they're in-depth enough to trigger the 'detailed = realistic' fallacy).
[1]I even used the Action PC Football sim to see the (somewhat) realistic chances of a Madden meme video happening. Answer: 0.21% percent.
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- Location
- In a van, down by the river.
Love this book. Thank you Liam Connell for reminding us of it!