PREFACE

This short book is an essay on the use of counterfactuals in historical research and writing. By counterfactuals, I mean alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred. In the chapters that follow, examples that are discussed at length include what would have happened had Britain not entered the First World War but stood aside as a neutral nonbelligerent; what the result might have been had Britain concluded a separate peace with Nazi Germany in 1940 or 1941; or how the British might have behaved had they lost the Battle of Britain and been conquered and occupied by the armed forces of Hitler’s Third Reich. The opening chapter surveys the development of counterfactual history from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, and tries to account for its revival and its popularity, especially in Britain and the United States, in the 1990s and 2000s. The second considers the arguments for and against the use of counterfactuals, and discusses some of the principal contributions to the genre and their implications for what many of their authors call historical determinism. Chapter 3 looks at a variety of ways in which writers of history and fiction have reinvented the past for their own purposes, including the construction of parallel “alternate” histories and imaginary representations of the future based on alterations made to the past. The fourth and final chapter tries to pull all this together and reach some kind of conclusion about whether or not counterfactuals are a useful tool for the historian, and, if so, in what ways, to what extent, and with what limitations.

I first became interested in counterfactuals in 1998, when I took part in a televised discussion on BBC News 24’s program Robin Day’s Book Talk with Antonia Fraser and Niall Ferguson, who had just published his pathbreaking book in the field, Virtual History. My own In Defense of History had just come out, and the idea of counterfactual history seemed to raise in a new way the fundamental questions about the borders between fact and fiction with which that book had tried to grapple. So when I was asked to deliver the Butterfield Lecture at Queen’s University, Belfast, in October 2002, it seemed a good opportunity to come to grips with these questions at greater length. An edited version of the lecture was published as “Telling It Like It Wasn’t,” in the BBC History Magazine, number 3 (2002), pp. 2–4; and then reprinted by request in the American journal Historically Speaking, issue 5/4 (March 2004), where it was the subject of several lively and lengthy discussions, to which I was able to reply in the same issue (pp. 28–31); the whole exchange was reprinted in Donald A. Yerxa’s Recent Themes in Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 120–30.

The response by Geoffrey Parker and Philip Tetlock in Historically Speaking, and the more elaborate arguments they deployed in the introduction and conclusion to their edited volume of counterfactuals, Unmaking the West, published two years later, made me realize that my initial, somewhat allergic reaction to the claims made by the counterfactualists needed rethinking, and the appearance in the following years of further contributions to the genre gave me further cause for reconsideration. Moreover, there are by now several theoretical and reflective considerations of the problems counterfactual history raises, ranging from the highly critical to the carefully justificatory. These have helped move the debate to a new level. So when I was asked by the Historical Society of Israel, an independent organization whose history goes back well into the 1930s, to deliver the Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures for 2013 on some topic of historical interest with a particular emphasis on its methodological and theoretical aspects, I welcomed the opportunity to revisit the subject of counterfactuals and think about it at further length. The present book is the result. It reprints the lectures more or less as given, except that chapters 3 and 4 were merged and abridged to form the third and final lecture in the series, and some material and arguments have subsequently been added to the text.

My first debt of gratitude is to the Historical Society of Israel, its chairman, Professor Israel Bartel, its general secretary Mr. Zvi Yekutiel, and its board of directors for having done me the signal honor of inviting me to give the lectures. Following in the footsteps of historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Anthony Grafton, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Fergus Millar, Natalie Zemon Davis, Anthony Smith, Peter Brown, Jürgen Kocka, Keith Thomas, Heinz Schlling, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Patrick Geary is a daunting task, but it was made easier for me by Maayan Avineri-Rebhun, the society’s academic secretary, who arranged everything with exemplary courtesy and efficiency. Tovi Weiss provided indispensable assistance, and the staff at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the guesthouse and cultural center on the hill overlooking the forbidding walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, were unfailingly helpful. The audiences who listened patiently to the lectures helped improve the book’s arguments with their questions, while Otto Dov Kulka not only pointed me toward the thought of Johan Huizinga on this topic but also proved a genial and stimulating host in our travels in and around Jerusalem, where Ya’ad Biran provided expert guidance around the endlessly fascinating sites to be found within the city walls. Professor Yosef Kaplan, chief editor of the Stern Lecture Series, helped see the lectures into print. My agent, Andrew Wylie, and his staff, especially James Pullen at the London branch of the agency, worked hard to secure the book’s publication under terms that will, it is to be hoped, give it a wide distribution. The staff at Brandeis University Press were thorough and professional, and I am particularly grateful to Richard Pult and Susan Abel, for overseeing the production process, to Cannon Labrie for his expert copyediting of the typescript, and to Tim Whiting at Little, Brown, for his work on the UK and Commonwealth edition. Simon Blackburn, Christian Goeschel, Rachel Hoffman, David Motadel, Pernille Røge, and Astrid Swenson read the typescript on short notice and suggested many improvements. Christine L. Corton cast an expert eye over the proofs. I am grateful to them all, though none of them bears any responsibility for what follows.

RICHARD J. EVANS

Cambridge

July 2013