I was delighted by the first What If? book. So I eagerly purchased its successor volume, More What If?, when I also came across that in a remainder shop.
I buy lots of books in remainder shops – my intellectual efforts beiong heavily influenced by chance purchases – and often only read them months or years later. So it has been with More What If? I am now, finally, reading it. Not in any particular order. Just dipping at random, in among reading and writing other stuff. (This posting is not a review, merely some speculative reactions to this follow-up book, but here is a review, which includes a contents list.)
And the more I dip, the more convinced I am of the extreme efficacy and vividness of this particular way of writing about the past. Reviewers like the one linked to above can get rather blasé, because they know all this stuff anyway. (As he says in his first paragraph, the professional historians all have what-if conversations when doing their degrees.) But for the rest of us, this is a truly terrific way to learn history, because it brings it so alive. Suddenly, the uncertainty and unpredictability of what it was actually like living in what is now the past but was then the present is brought fascinatingly to life. Regular history tells you what happened, one damn happening after another, but it often neglects to tell you which happenings mattered most, and why. The What If? formula cuts down on the number of happenings, but explains in great detail how important each selected happening was, by telling you not only what else happened because of it, but also what would have happened had the happening itself not happened, or happened differently. Examples: Maybe you did know that someone tried to kill FDR in 1933, although I did not. But did you know that way before that, FDR proposed marriage unsuccessfully to a conventionally good-looking, conventionally Republican young lady, before he switched his amorous attentions to lefty cousin Eleanor? Yes. Had he married Alice Sohier instead of Eleanor, he would surely, in the event of still becoming President at all, have become a very different sort of President.
Did you know that before Martin Luther got seriously started at making history, he might have been burnt at the stake at the very beginning of his career as a religious troublemaker? Apparently so, in 1521. Luther burns, and there is no Luther Bible, and no Authorised Version of the Bible as we (I anyway) know and love it, because (and I did not know this) our Authorised (“King James”) Bible drew heavily from Luther’s work. Oh, and the German Reformation would also have played out very differently, and perhaps – who knows? – far less destructively.
Did you know that if France had been a bit less belligerent in 1870, Germany might never, following Prussia’s stunning success in the war that did then occurred, have been united in the particular, toxic way that it was?
Did you know that China might very well have discovered America in the late fifteenth century, and subsequently (again – who knows?) conquered it?
You probably do know that, in the opinion of many, Caleb Carr in particular, General Eisenhower might have handled the assault by the Western Allies on Germany in the late summer 1944 a whole lot better than he did. There might, that is to say, have been an assault by the Western Allies on Germany in the late summer of 1944, instead of only several months later. That way, Eastern Europe might have escaped Soviet tyranny, and the very Cold War itself might have been permanently cooled down.
Meanwhile, what if there had been no atom bombs to drop on Japan? (That chapter makes a gruesomely good case for dropping them, given that they did have them.)
What if, a few years earlier, Enigma had not been cracked? Or what if war had started in 1938 instead of 1939? (Much better, apparently. Appeasement did great harm, says Williamson Murray.)
What if Socrates had died at the Battle of Delium, if Napoleon had invaded North America, if William had not been The Conqueror, of if Jesus of Nazareth had lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes?
What if Pizarro had not found any potatoes in Peru?
Questions like these turn the past into something more like the present, the sort of present in which our heads spin with still fresh what-ifs concerning our recent past and our immediate future.
What if the 9/11 conspirators had been caught before they did their evil business?
What if someone cleverer than John Kerry had been chosen by the Democrats last year, and what if that other person had become President instead of GWB getting a second term? How does that change the future of the Axis of Evil? (It has been said that all it might have taken for Kerry himself to win would have for those Rathergate forgeries to have been forged by someone half competent.)
And, although I do not know any of the details to back the claim, I bet you anything that the earlier life of George W. Bush, just like that of FDR, is fraught with a succession of what-ifs, any one of which might have turned GWB into a dead drunk by now. What if God, to consider just one for-instance, had not found him?
What if the advice of those who advised that the recent Iraq election should have been postponed until things in Iraq had quietened down had been taken instead of ignored?
Speaking of God, and bringing all this home to Samizdata-land, what if Tony Blair were to have a heart attack tomorrow afternoon? (Yesterday I was conversing with some lefties who said that great swathes of the Labour Party devoutly hopes that he will, soon. They yearn for the God of medical chance to do for them that which they dare not do themselves for fear of offending the voters.) What if someone lets off a mega-bomb in the middle of Paris next week? What if Turkey does (or does not) join the EU? What if, as I speculated in my earlier piece, China falters in its ascent to superpowerdom? What if Asian Bird Flu turns seriously nasty? What if, as is apparently feared, a lump of the Canary Islands (I think it is the Canary Islands) falls into the sea and unleashes a North Atlantic Tsunami, similar to but even worse than the Tsunami that did recently wreck the coasts of South East Asia, and what if the Tsunami that did happen had not happened?
In my opinion, one of the more subtle effects of the Tsunami (that did happen) has been to push 9/11 rather more quickly into “history” than would happened otherwise. I surmise that a great many people, even quite a few Americans, are just that tiny bit less bothered by 9/11, which killed just over three thousand people, now that a giant wave in another part of the world has killed nearer to three hundred thousand people, a great many of them Muslims. The History Date that was 9/11 now has another huge and in terms of mere dead bodies far huger History Date between it and now, so to speak. Maybe, logically, this ought not to change anything, because murder is one thing and accident quite another, but I sense that maybe it does. That effect would be hard to prove and even harder to quantify, but it might be true, maybe, possibly. And that is not even to begin to enumerate all the personal futures – all those potential Great Lives who will now never be lived – which were snuffed out by the Big Wave. No doubt we are well rid of some of them, although of course we cannot now know which.
My favourite what-ifs are the ones that start with someone very obscure doing something very obscure slightly differently, which causes X, which causes Y – Y being a happening of universally agreed importance – not to happen. The human version of the Butterfly Effect, in other words. Going back to FDR again, apparently the bloke who did the backstage politics for FDR’s rise to the Presidency had previously been working for another politician, and this other politician got fed up with politics and threw in the towel, and is now completely forgotten in consequence, apart from the indirect effect he had on FDR. What if he had carried on, and the bloke who was helping him had carried on helping him, and as a result had never helped FDR? Fascinating. I never had a clue about any of that until now.
So, all of your rush now to Amazon and purchase What If?, if you have not done so already, and More What If?, and any sequels that by your buying frenzy you persuade Robert Cowley to produce in the future. I want more.
There is now also “What if – America?” available looking at questions such as “What happened after the Cuban Missile Crisis went nuclear”?
Hmm. Ten times as many people in the tsunami. But I had a thought, turn that around, what if 20 skyscrapers had been blown up? That would be a tsunami’s worth of deaths in a distance you could walk across in ten minutes. Modern cities really are amazingly full of people and scarily vulnerable.
Oh, I love those books. My very last day of working at a particular chain bookstore was the day a combination hardback of those two volumes came in to our store for the discount rack. I saw it by accident and, through my discount (which applies because the books in the bargain section come into the store with the low prices), got it for under $5— in the vicinity of a couple of pounds.
The bargain section is your friend, because they stock hardbacks and trade paper in the form of ends of print runs, and sometimes they are the history books that you’d love to stock up on. (In the US, that’s generally US Civil War books; I don’t know what the popular Brit equivalent would be.)
For point of reference, I’m an ex-historian. Throw me into the “blasé” category.
Regular history tells you what happened, one damn happening after another, but it often neglects to tell you which happenings mattered most, and why.
Well, good historians don’t or shouldn’t operate that way. Of my ideal historians are folks like Orlando Patterson, Simon Schama, Diarmand McCulloch, David Eltis, Julian Jackson, Alan Taylor, Edmund S. Morgan, Norman Davies, Fernand Braudel, etc.
Did you know that before Martin Luther got seriously started at making history, he might have been burnt at the stake at the very beginning of his career as a religious troublemaker?
Yes. He was afforded the protection he was guaranteed in a way that Hus was not. Interesting sidenote, indulgences were such an issue for many Germans, Czechs, etc., because that was where they were common. It was only after the Council of Trent, that is after the start of the Counter-Reformation, that indulgences became popular and common in Italy, Spain, etc.
Did you know that if France had been a bit less belligerent in 1870, Germany might never, following Prussia’s stunning success in the war that did then occurred, have been united in the particular, toxic way that it was?
Of course Prussia might just have provoked another war with another power, say Russia.
Did you know that China might very well have discovered America in the late fifteenth century, and subsequently (again – who knows?) conquered it?
If you are referring to the claim that the fleet of Zheng He reached the Americas, that is at best far fetched. At the very least Gavin Menzies claims are ultimately unsupportable.
There might, that is to say, have been an assault by the Western Allies on Germany in the late summer of 1944, instead of only several months later. That way, Eastern Europe might have escaped Soviet tyranny, and the very Cold War itself might have been permanently cooled down.
Well, shit if the British hadn’t insisted on attacking North Africa and Italy and had went along with the American general staff’s desire for an invasion of France in 1942 or 1943 maybe Ike wouldn’t have needed to be more successful than he was in 1944.
Meanwhile, what if there had been no atom bombs to drop on Japan?
You continue the far more destructive fire-bombing campaigns.
What if Socrates had died at the Battle of Delium…
We’d be celebrating a different philosopher’s life maybe. Perhaps a philosopher who wasn’t so allergic to the written word. 🙂
…if Napoleon had invaded North America…
He didn’t have to. He already had a largely colony there. But to quote Napoleon on the Louisiana Purchase:
“This accession of territory strengthens forever the power of the United States; and I have just given to England a maritime rival that will sooner or later humble her pride.”
…if William had not been The Conqueror…
If Harold had won? Or if Edward the Confessor had gotten his limp dick up and fathered a child? Or if after Hastings an English Earl had defeated William?
…of if Jesus of Nazareth had lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes?
Or if Appolonius’ cult had created a following that swamped Christ’s?
Questions like these turn the past into something more like the present, the sort of present in which our heads spin with still fresh what-ifs concerning our recent past and our immediate future.
Counterfactuals are interesting, but ultimately they amount to a heck of a lot intellectual jerking off.
What if the advice of those who advised that the recent Iraq election should have been postponed until things in Iraq had quietened down had been taken instead of ignored?
Well, given that it was Sistani and his followers were the primary force behind the election, it seems unlikely that Bush could have done anything to stop it. After all, the Bush administration was against it before it was forced to be for it.
What if someone lets off a mega-bomb in the middle of Paris next week?
I’d be seriously pissed off.
B. Durbin,
As a rule stores like B&N and Borders have fairly thin history selections and they tend to concentrate in well trodden over areas (e.g., WWII, Civil War, etc.). I am always disappointed by the selection of books on the early republic, European history generally, anything prior to the Meiji “restoration” in Japan, etc.
Baen and Harry Turtledoev have published a whole series of military what ifs called “Alternate Generals” – http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=hturtledove
If you’re interested in alternate histories then you might find the soc.history.what-if Usenet group interesting (though it is currently in the midst of a spam attack by a holocaust denier) or Ferguson’s book Virtual History is you can find a copy of that not least for FDR’s lament ‘The only thing we have too dear is beer itself’.
Sometimes that kind of speculation is less meaningful than it first appears. But sometimes there really are events in history in which seemingly very small things end up having preposterously huge consequences, very much of a “for want of a nail” kind of thing.
For me, the one which impresses me most is a peculiar event during the Battle of Midway. American codebreakers had given Nimitz the information he needed to place his three carriers where they had the best chance of stopping the Japanese attack, but that didn’t make the battle a pushover. The Japanese carrier commander didn’t expect the Americans to be there, but didn’t totally take it for granted that they were not.
So he ordered that an air search be made of the area where the American carriers actually turned out to be. The search was carried out using float planes launched by Japanese cruisers which were accompanying the four Japanese big-deck carriers.
But one of those cruisers, the Tone, had technical problems with its catapault and was late getting its plane launched. That scout plane turned out to be the one which was tasked with searching in the place where USS Yorktown was eventually spotted.
If that scout had launched on time, the entire battle would have been different. It’s the kind of thing that sometimes makes me wonder if there might not be timetravelers making very small changes in the past to shepherd history into channels they want it to follow.
My all time favourite is also the first one I ever read, in World of Wonder magazine when I was about nine.
This bit’s true: Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s police actually had a tip off there were assassins waiting. So they planned for his car to take another route. But either they forgot to tell the driver or he forgot to follow instructions; the car started to turn down the road where Princip was waiting… and you know the rest.
If the driver had got the message, maybe there would have been no assassination, then maybe no WWI, then maybe no WWII…
Well, I guess the author of that piece is long dead by now. But I remain grateful to him for starting a life long interest.
Well, I’m not so smart as to answer the what if questions, but I do think the idea of China settling the Western shore of North America at the same time Europeans are settling the Eastern Shore (with the Spaniards to the south) has the makings of a fascinating book. Or a video game (or has that already been done?)
Of course, the downside of such a fascinating story would be that the U.S. as we know it probably never occurs and that would be a tragedy for the world.
Still a quite interesting alternative history concept.
Natalie, your “what if” isn’t really much of one. WWI was going to happen, no matter what. The political and military situation in Europe at the time was super-critical, waiting for some event to set it off. It happened to be that assassination, but if that hadn’t done it, something else would have.
That assassination set of the sequence of events, but it wasn’t the cause of WWI, except in the most reductionist of senses.
I agree that World War I was primed to start one way or another. As an Australian, I am perhaps more interested in a different question.
What if the ANZAC forces had taken the high ground at Gallipoli on the first couple of days. Would the campaign have then gone as planned with Istanbul falling soon afterwards and the Royal Navy gaining control of the Black Sea, with who knows what consequences for the rest of the war, or would the campaign have simply gone wrong a little bit later somewhere else.
But even if the battle had been won but the campaign lost later, the consequences still could have been quite profound, as the prestige of the Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal would not have raised as a consequence of the Turkish victory and he probably would never have gone on to rename himself Ataturk and found modern Turkey. It really was a pivotal moment for a variety of different groups of people.
There is one “What if” which really intrigues me:
What if by accident, evolution or design human beings acquired the ability to completely and utterly avoid doing anything stupid?
Take any crucial point in history and remove stupidity from the equation and the whole world turns on its head.
Sorry Brian, I think counterfactuals are a parlour game. Real history is much more difficult and more interesting.
Julian Morrison writes:
“Hmm. Ten times as many people in the tsunami. …”
300,000 divided by 300 is more like hundered then ten…
Another correction: I mean 300,000 / 3,000 = 100
Eh, I blame posting when sleepy…
I agree that alternative history is a fascinating game! There are some very good alternative histories at
http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/althis.htm
see also:
Virtual history in Wikipedia
I disagree with Gary Gunnels and a few others that counterfactual history is just a parlour game. It can bring out useful insights into the impact of particular events and our understanding of them.
Anyway, I like parlour games.
Here’s another one:
what if Nelson had not stopped Napoleon’s sea-based invasion of England?
If everything is affected by everything else, wouldn’t any change in history alter the whole world greatly? Chaos, complexity, fairy cakes etc.
I think the reason that Borders, at least, doesn’t have much in the way of good non-US history is that, as a chain store, they do tend to go after the big targets, and quite honestly, there aren’t that many non-US stores. The individual managers do have some discretion, but then the title base is up to the individual’s abilities, which may not be stellar.
And GG, the primary interest in counterfactuals is that it exposes the casual student to events they might otherwise have known nothing about. The ones in What If? don’t expect you to know much about the event in question, and so explain what actually happened before speculating on the possible variations. (Sadly, it is possible to know nothing about some major events even with a good teacher. My survey course in college skipped the Crusades, an area which actually fell in the teacher’s specialty— she apparently wanted us to take a whole class on it rather than just get a summary.)
One of my favorites: what if Zimmerman had the sense to keep his big yap shut, and Americans wrote off his telegram as a hoax designed to sucker us into the war? The Kaiser victorious, and later a valuable ally against the USSR?
Another is: what if McKinley had lived? Would that have kept TR away from the White House, retarded the progress of the progressive movement, and ultimately kept technological and economic progress at a high clip? Would we be asking What If from our homes scattered across the Solar System, under American flags with a hundred or so stars?
A few of my favorite what ifs:
We pay attention to Churchill and invade the Balkans instead of the French Riviera (let Vichy rot).
The X15 program continues pushing higher and faster
Baghdad falls in February ’91
What if the ANZAC forces had taken the high ground at Gallipoli on the first couple of days.
… It really was a pivotal moment for a variety of different groups of people.
The Gallipoli campaign has been discussed many times on soc.history.what-if, precisely because of the possible major effects on European history (and a scattering of Anzacs who tend to bring it up as appropriate). I suggest you use Goggle groups to have a look around.
The most moving part of my visit to Gallipoli was standing on Chunuk Bair (which the NZers held for a day later in the campaign), just able to see the water on the other side. A short successful Gallipoli campaign is one of the most plausible ways to have a much shorter, cheaper WWI.
Ken,
One of my favorites: what if Zimmerman had the sense to keep his big yap shut, and Americans wrote off his telegram as a hoax designed to sucker us into the war? The Kaiser victorious, and later a valuable ally against the USSR?
There is no guarantee that the Germans would have been victorious without a U.S. entry into the war. Indeed, most of the spring 1918 German offensive – such as Michael – was fought against British and French forces. With or without the arrival of the “doughboys” the Germans would have faced the same problem in the summer of 1918 – the mauling of its crack troops from the Eastern front; decreasing manpower (oddly enough the French did not face this problem in 1918); a home front near starvation due to the embargo; domestic doubt as to the efficacy of the war effort; French and British governments more determined to win the war than at any time during the war; British and French tanks; more French artillery than France had ever fielding in the war; etc.. What the coming arrival of the “doughboys” did was to provide more of a psychological shock to the Germans than anything.
And of course the U.S. had already decisively entered the war on the Allied side prior to April 1917. The American financial markets decidedly favored Britain and France after all as did the American public generally.
JSAllison,
We pay attention to Churchill and invade the Balkans instead of the French Riviera (let Vichy rot).
We paid attention to Churchill and invaded Italy; see what sort of absolute fuck up and general waste of time that turned out to be.
BTW, the delay in the invasion of southern France significantly impeded the efforts in northern France; once those ports opened up they proved to be vital to the war effort in France. Furthermore, they flushed a large Germany army north that would have been to behind of the main allied force if they had been allowed to hang out on the Riviera.
Churchill was an unpleasant fucker who screwed around a heck of a lot of people. He may have defended British liberty, but when it came to the liberty of others, Czechs or Poles for example, he was willing to sell them down the river.
One of the more touching stories of WWII is that of Vlasov’s so-called “Forgotten Army” (note that Vlasov wouldn’t have had the chance to do what he did if Churchill hadn’t pulled the plug on arms airlifts to Prague): http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2004/Art/1111/news8.php
B. Durbin,
All I know is that Border’s sucks. 🙂
And GG, the primary interest in counterfactuals is that it exposes the casual student to events they might otherwise have known nothing about.
That may be true, but I think you can get that without counterfactuals though.
I’ve read about a thousand history monographs covering a wide variety of fields; I’d be more than happy to recommend some if you would like.
The ones in What If? don’t expect you to know much about the event in question…
That’s largely because elementary and secondary schools are such poor purveyors of knowledge.
Ken,
Note that one of the reasons that the German offensives of 1918 slowed down was because of the nutritional situation of the German army by that point. They would gain some ground, get into a town, and then sack it, filling their bellies with food. German officers couldn’t get their men to move because they were busy stuffing themselves. This gave British and French forces time to adjust and then resist further efforts. By 1918, despite its victory over Russia, Germany was in many ways in a far more desperate situation than likely the British were, and certainly more than the French. France had weathered its storm in April-May 1917; Germany paradoxically was just facing its storm as the 1918 offensives kicked off.
Ken,
British and French troops had no such nutritional problems; whatever else could be said about them, they were well fed on the bountiful harvests of France and the U.S.
BTW, I am not being a Anglophobe is slamming Churchill. Like FDR, I just consider him to be a man hardly worthy of the unquestioning laudatory praise often heaped upon him.
B. Durbin,
BTW, I always thought it rather wonderful that I could live in a society rich enough where I – a child of the poverty class – could have the leisure to read so much. 🙂
I’ve known Haitians – for example – who are just astounded that a society could “support” people like historians.
In response to What if the Iraq election had been postponed Gary Gunnels wrote:
I wonder what your source is for the premise of this what-if, the premise being that the President wanted to postpone the election. I was following the issue quite closely at the time, from what I can tell, the date of that election had been pretty much set by the time the U.N.-appointed (not just US) interim govt was handed limited sovereignty.
The voices in and out of the administration arguing for postponing the election were consistently identified with the realist camp (which existed on the left and the right, but mostly on the right IMO), or alternatively, with the mindless opposition. The realists were afraid the “wrong” people would win; the opposition wanted to (IMO) see Bush break his word so they could harp on it.
Whereas, the President consistently put himself in the idealist camp. Specifically, one got the sense that he considered it a personal and national promise to the Iraqis to keep that commitment, on time, for an election. This was in the same vein as keeping the commitment to hand over limited sovereignty, which you will recall, he did, actually several days ahead of schedule (which was brilliant theater and tactically smart as it probably upset the timing of whatever terrorist attacks were planned for the occasion).
As to the what-if — had the President come out in favor of postponing the election, I can’t imagine Sistani’s followers or other Iraqis could have held an election, from a practical point of view, without the assistance of coalition and U.N. forces. Maybe the U.N. would have attempted to go ahead regardless, but more likely they would have (once again) pulled out, citing security. Nor is it clear that Iraqis *would* go ahead with the election, regardless of the postponement. They would likely have seen it not as a logistical or tactical change (i.e. a different means to the same ends, elections) but as betrayal and proof that the U.S. never intended to let them vote in the first place.
So, I must disagree with both your premise, and your extrapolation. The more likely what-if would be, after postponing elections, the Shiite momentum shifts away from the Sistani camp, and back towards the Sadr camp, with disastrous results. The elections might never have happened, or if they did, we would be reading about low turnout in the Shiite areas, instead of just the Sunni areas.
e-Hadj,
I wonder what your source is for the premise of this what-if, the premise being that the President wanted to postpone the election.
The Bush administration opposed the early, nation-wide elections that Sistani and his followers campaigned for. Shit, Sistani had to put a hundred thousand protestors on the street before the Bush administration finally assented to them. Apparently you weren’t following the issue that closely. All you need do is google the issue and you’d realize that back in January of 2004 the administration was resisting the nation-wide, direct elections that Sistani and his followers wanted
The voices in and out of the administration arguing for postponing the election were consistently identified with the realist camp (which existed on the left and the right, but mostly on the right IMO), or alternatively, with the mindless opposition. The realists were afraid the “wrong” people would win; the opposition wanted to (IMO) see Bush break his word so they could harp on it.
You are talking about what happened after the Bush administration finally agreed to support a nation-wide election. I am discussing their foot-dragging on the issue prior to that support. It was the “people power” movement of Sistani that forced hands of Bush into holding an election they initially stated was unrealistic. Before that “people power” movement came to fruition, the Bush administration was backing a plan for transferring power through a provisional legislature selected by 18 regional caucuses, putting off direct elections to some future date.
Whereas, the President consistently put himself in the idealist camp.
Yeah, whatever. The Bush administration clearly resisted having early nation-wide, direct elections until Sistani put protestors into action. If the Bush administration was so in favor of the elections, why the hell would Sistani and his people be putting folks on the streets demanding elections? Like I wrote earlier, Bush was against it before he for it. Get in touch with reality.
“Like I wrote earlier, Bush was against it before he was for it. Get in touch with reality.”
Sources please.
Rgds
One of mine: what if the Tet Offensive had been properly reported and analyzed by the media, instead of turned into a “victory” for the North Vietnamese? Would the Vietnam War develop into Afghanistan for the Sovs, with the Berlin Wall falling maybe 10-15 years earlier? And would SE Asia be a prosperous trading region with the world bitching about its huge deficits with the Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos manufacturing and technology juggernaut?
What if “Freemasonry” was really a front for the Jesuits? What if the ‘American Revolution’ was staged to seize north america for Rome? What if the United States is the secret weapon of the Roman Empire? What if the Civil War was staged to make the Central Government even more Powerful? What if the Germans in WW1 were actually the good guys… What if … Wait a minute. This isn’t a counterfactual. That’s what actually happened!
What would have happened if the United States would have supported the Vietnamese in 1945-1946 instead of backing the French? Would we have stayed out of a war? Would it have been good policy? Love to know what you think? I need lots of input.
I agree with those who argue that counterfactuals are ‘a good thing'(Link). Without a testing of alternative hypotheses, history is no more than story telling. Counterfactuals are the closest we can get to experimental testing.