Dismissed by some as mere speculation, examining ‘what ifs’ can shed valuable light on neglected perspectives
, each grappling with a timeline in which the allied powers lose to Hitler’s Germany. Others roll back history and send it hurtling like a cannonball in a different direction altogether, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, in which the near erasure of Europe’s population by plague leads to an alternative geopolitics in which Islam and Buddhism are the dominant religions.
For historians, counterfactualism and the attention it pays to what did not happen is an odd, dark realm – often silly, sometimes dangerous, and almost always problematic. Occasionally it leads to entertaining name-calling: EP Thompson’s dismissal of it as “, unhistorical shit” is colourful enough to have had a life beyond the book in which is first appeared, 1978’s The Poverty of Theory.
“Why are we so prone in the early 21st century to approaching history in this way?” Evans asked. For him our interest in the history of what could have been is linked to the postmodern condition, to the distrust in expertise and facts that seems to colour both public and academic debate. Those are valid concerns. There is, however, an alternative perspective.
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? These questions have always depended on differential access to power.
As present debates about what constitutes history continue to evoke images of a monolithic, unchanging understanding of the past, constructed out of blocks of neutral facts excavated from the archives, it is time, perhaps, that we pay new attention to fragments and lost voices, historical cul-de-sacs and missed turns, to the history that was not recorded, and the history that did not happen.
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