[ALBSA-Info] Article by Noel Malcolm

[Agron Alibali]

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) May 12, 2002, Sunday 
Copyright 2002 The Telegraph Group Limited   
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) 
May 12, 2002, Sunday 
 Pg. 13 


Take your pick of the pasts The history that didn't happen can shed new light on the history that did, says Noel Malcolm 

By NOEL MALCOLM 


More What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been ed by Robert Cowley 

Macmillan, pounds 18.99, 427 pp pounds 16.99 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222 

OF ALL THE weasel-expressions in the politicians' phrasebook, none is more weaselly than "I don't speculate about hypothetical situations." Of course they do - they would get nowhere in politics if they didn't. Imagine a military commander saying "I never speculate about the possible consequences of different actions", or a businessman, or a chess-player. All human life is based on decision-making, and decisions are made by thinking about "what if". Traditionally, the only people who were allowed not to think about hypothetical situations were the historians - for the simple reason that while decision-making is about the future, history-writing is about the past. "What if" history is speculation as opposed to history: there is no subject-matter, no material for research, no hypothetical documents to be studied in counter-factual archives. Hence the sniffy disdain of many professional historians towards this style of thinking: while politicians and generals have to think about what may yet happen, historians feel no need to consider what might have happened, but didn't. 

In recent years, however, that disdainful attitude has started to fade away. Books of essays by major historians, such as Niall Ferguson's collection, Virtual History, or Robert Cowley's previous volume, What If? (to which this new book is a sequel), have shown that counter-factual history can be two things at once. It can be serious, raising important questions about how and why things turned out the way they did; and it can be fun. At its best, indeed, it can be marvellously entertaining as well as thought-provoking - the finest intellectual parlour-game around. 

More What If? offers an extraordinary variety of speculative re-writes. Like its predecessor it spans three millennia, from Ancient Greece to the Cold War; unlike that earlier volume, it is not confined to military history. The what-ifs conjured up by Cowley's contributors here include Ming Emperors discovering America, Luther being burnt as a heretic, and Franklin Roosevelt being succeeded not by Harry Truman but by the left-wing idealist Henry Wallace. There is even an essay exploring the consequences of Pontius Pilate's thoroughly commendable decision to release Jesus Christ from detention. 

But military history remains the bedrock of this collection. Antony and Cleopatra win the battle of Actium; William of Normandy loses the battle of Hastings; Germany wins the First World War; Hitler unleashes a none-too-successful Blitzkrieg against Czechoslovakia in 1938; and instead of dropping the atom bomb, the US military launches its planned invasion of Japan. 

In some ways, the most compelling essays are the ones that stick close to military affairs. Nor is this surprising: a war-fighting scenario is more of a closed system, like a chessboard, in which plausible alternatives can be pursued through whole sequences of moves. Military historians cannot afford to be sniffy about such counter-factual sequences, as the decision-making processes they study consist of thinking about little else. 

Thus the essay on the alternatives to Hiroshima (by Richard Frank) uses actual strategic studies drawn up by the US military in 1945, calculating likely losses in the event of a landing in Japan: up to half a million US dead and injured, with a much higher total of Japanese casualties. Frank gives good reasons for thinking that these were under-estimates, and adds that the alternative, a long blockade, might have led to death by starvation for millions. (He does not explore one other approach, however: demonstrating the power of the atom bomb, but on less heavily populated targets.) 

Equally compelling, but much more surprising, are the essays exploring the possibilities of German success in 1915 and failure in 1938. Robert O'Connell suggests that a no-holds-barred submarine campaign by the Kaiser's navy could have starved Britain into submission. Williamson Murray turns the conventional wisdom about Munich on its head: it may have bought time for Britain to prepare for war, but (although Hitler did not realise this) the time was needed even more badly by Germany. If the over-confident Fuhrer had got the war he was spoiling for in 1938, his army might well have become stretched to breaking-point within a few months. 

The essays on non-military matters are more of a mixed bag - not because hypothetical speculation is improper outside the military realm, but because it is more difficult. In fact, all historical analysis involves some such speculation, if only by implication: if you say that factor A was an essential cause of event B, you are implying that in the absence of A, B would not have happened. A negative counter-factual (a world without B) is thus quite easy to invent. The problem is that, outside the closed system of the war-game, it is much harder to construct the positive counter-factuals - the detailed histories of C, D or E that would have happened instead. 

The least interesting essays, therefore, are the ones that play safe, sticking to a simple negative. Thus we are told that if Lenin had not got to Petrograd, the Russian Revolution would not have succeeded. If Lyndon Johnson had not benefited from some Texan ballot-rigging in 1948, he would never have ended up President. And if Luther had been executed, the Reformation might have failed politically, fragmenting into vulnerable sectarianism instead. 

The most disappointing essay in the book, by Theodore Rabb, asks what would have happened if Charles I (and his children) had died of plague in 1641, being succeeded on the throne by his sister Elizabeth, the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia. The answer - that the Civil War would not have happened - is as dull as it is plausible. (Bizarrely, Rabb claims that if Charles had died in 1641 Hobbes would never have felt the need to write about politics; Hobbes's first major work on politics was written in 1640.) 

But the most brilliant essays, on the other hand, are the ones that really spread their wings, exploring politics and geopolitics as well as military affairs. The wittiest pieces here, combining bold conjecture with an un-American lightness of touch, are by Alistair Horne and Andrew Roberts: the former playfully eliminates the Franco-Prussian war and prevents the unification of Germany, while the latter has Halifax as Prime Minister in 1940, a negotiated Anglo-German peace settlement soon thereafter, and an eventual Soviet conquest of German-ruled territory, bringing the Iron Curtain all the way to Calais. 

And of the American geopolitical essays, two are especially memorable: one by Thomas Fleming, in which Napoleon ends up ruling a bi-racial republic in Louisiana (established with the help of the black rebel leader in Haiti, Toussaint L'Ouverture), and one by John Lukacs, in which Teddy Roosevelt replaces Woodrow Wilson as President in 1912, and brings the First World War to a very different end. Lukacs has the last laugh, however: continuing the story through the 1920s and 1930s, he shows how the Second World War could have happened all the same. 

This is the ultimate shaggy-dog story of what-if history: everything changes, but it all ends up the same. Now what could be more counter-factual than that? 

Noel Malcolm is editor of the Clarendon 'Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes'. 
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