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Counterfactuals

Jeremy Black, in his book '"War and the World" (Yale, 1998), page 133, says:

Counterfactual history has always had its critics, and has generally been presented as trivial if not misleading. However, it has much to offer as an approach. The past was far more complex than is generally presented and historians need to guard against the processes and methods that suggest or imply a degree of inevitability. Instead, the past cannot be understood if the elements of chance and contingency are ignored. In recreating the world of choice in uncertainty that affected decisions and developments, scholars, teachers and students alike are restoring the element of free will, a moral dimension, to history - one which invites us, in considering how people in the past chose, to reflect on what we might have done, and do, in similar circumstances.

The uncertainties of the past restore a human perspective to an historical imagination too often dominated by impersonal forces. Military history is the most obvious field in which it is dangerous to adopt thc perspective of hindsight. War-gamers devote their time to an entirely reasonable pastime, asking whether battles, campaigns and conflicts could have had different results. Could the Jacobites have won, the British have defeated the American revolutionaries or the Confederates triumphed in the American Civil War? The role of chance and contingent factors of terrain, leadership quality, morale, the availability of reserves and the unpredictable spark that ignites a powder magazine, appear crucial when explaining particular engagements. War is not always won by the big battalions and the determinist economic account that would explain success in international relations in terms of the economic strength of particular states, the approach essentially adopted in Paul Kennedy's influential Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), is open to serious question.