For many engaged in such questioning today, the impetus towards counterfactual history is quite clearly not about prioritising great men and major events. Instead, they remind us that the archives and methodologies on which conventional historical “evidence” depends are themselves hardly ever neutral. Who lived? Whose records survived? What stories are told and how have they been put to work?
I do quite like this point--gets at a lot of why I enjoy the genre. Not only is the past not fixed, but the stories we tell ourselves about the past and the trends contained in it can be just as changeable.
I liked their "personal" example on India, and the assertion that not considering alternatives leads to considering the present as inevitableI love how she brings up the Livy "We'd have crushed Alexander" as an example of how shallow and politicized counterfactuals have soured academics to AH.
This is actually one of the reasons why I'm enjoying writing the AH in my All Union novel. I like having a world where the perspectives totally are different. It's the US who's untried at major war (no 1991 Gulf) while the surviving Soviets showed their conventional power in a stomp (the invasion of Romania.) Even the "Sovereign Union's" critics are terrified at the notion of it breaking up, and so on. It's still just the background to genre fiction, but I love the feeling of having an overwhelming historical belief being far different from our world's.
Yes and it seems a bit of a shame that the people who were not the victors or are not dominant in global discourse are obliged to turn to AH to make it clear that they had a role in history as it played out for real. This is only highlighted (though it is getting better - e.g. 'Black Tudors' by Miranda Kaufmann) if we diverge from actual history, to provide the coverage they should get in the vanilla version.I do quite like this point--gets at a lot of why I enjoy the genre. Not only is the past not fixed, but the stories we tell ourselves about the past and the trends contained in it can be just as changeable.
"... the assertion that not considering alternatives leads to considering the present as inevitable."
Yes, when teaching history and indeed in a lot of AH I have written I have argued that this sense of inevitability is an unhealthy one for our societies. It is very much history being written by the victor. Many of the worst regimes, if we look at the USSR and Nazi Germany, have portrayed themselves as 'right' by arguing they were historically inevitable, it was either a Marxist or a racial destiny. This then becomes a tool for undermining opponents who are then portrayed as if they were trying to stop the rain falling from the sky or the change in seasons, whereas in human history there has usually been room for change as the fall of those two 'inevitable' regimes show. In 1991, you perhaps would not have thought that we would effectively be in a new Cold War with the same players by 2023, yet I would argue that authoritarian regimes being dominant in the world is not inevitable as phases of the post-1945 period have shown, though never everywhere all at once.
Very true - the same could be said of the Ulster crisis and the suffragette bombing campaign which were submerged in the historiography/popular memory by the rubble of the Great War.Yes and it seems a bit of a shame that the people who were not the victors or are not dominant in global discourse are obliged to turn to AH to make it clear that they had a role in history as it played out for real. This is only highlighted (though it is getting better - e.g. 'Black Tudors' by Miranda Kaufmann) if we diverge from actual history, to provide the coverage they should get in the vanilla version.
I remember when writing online about the Great Unrest period of 1910-11 in Britain and Ireland in which there were substantial strikes in many cities. King George V wrote a letter in which he worried for his throne (it is in the National Archives). Liverpool had a general strike and South Wales became a kind of special military zone. One day in August 1911, every soldier in Britain was mobilised to secure points along the railways. People were shot dead in Llanelli and in Liverpool, there were naval vessels in the Mersey and Humber. However, commenting on this on a BBC Forum (even though 'The One Show' had a brief feature on it in 2011), it was dismissed as AH and people denied it happened, though by definition millions of Britons whose ancestors had been in the country back then were involved on one side or another. Yet, the strikers lost and with the Great War commentators portrayed the country as united in patriotism. The 'winners' portray the late 'Edwardian' period as a lot golden age when in fact it was riven by civil strife.
