[SHWI] A Note For Counterfactual History
Apr. 19th, 2004 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI'm not sure how happy I am that I've finished my Laurence Sterne paper, much less that I'm happy with it. I do like to think that I've raised some interesting points, though. One thing I noticed in my research was an apprent tension--at least at the higher levels of English society--between the nationalism of an emerging British state and a popular Francophile cosmopolitanism. Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1737-1837 presents what seems to be the orthodox position, that the existence of a French threat and the fear of a recurrence of the intermittant chaos of the 17th century encouraged the Protestants of the British Isles to rally around a common state. One interesting book I've found--Robin Eagles' Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815--tries to counter Colley's points, arguing that at least among the mobile upper classes there was a decided Francophilia broadly manifested. For instance,
Colley's argument remains basically unchallenged by Eagles' position, since Eagles concedes that there isn't much sign that the Francophilia of the elite aristocratic and mercantile minorities penetrated to the level of the British masses. Nonetheless, in reading Eagles' story, I was strongly reminded of Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, which described how, at the same time as England's wealthiest populations demonstrated their Francophilia, the elite populations of non-Francophone France--in the Germanic east, in Celtic Brittany, in the lands of the langue d'oc--were assimilated to French culture. Francophile English and French provincials reacted in much the same way to the prestige of the French language, French literature and theatre, and French fashion. Yet, the internal peripheries of France were in the end assimilated into France; the state of France's minority languages is proof of this. England, and Britain were not assimilated. Why is this? How did Britain differ from provincial France? Could the fates of the two regions have differed, and if so, how?
It was appropriate, in light of this essay, that while visiting Castrovalva I noticed that Richard R, had written a brief commentary on Tristram Hunt's article in The Guardian criticizing alternate histories:
The conservatives who contribute to this literature portray themselves as battling against the dominant but flawed ideologies of Marxist and Whig history. Such analyses of the past, they say, never allow for the role of accident and serendipity. Instead, the past is presented as a series of milestones in an advance towards communism or liberal democracy. It is the calling of these modern iconoclasts to reintroduce the crooked timber of humanity back into history.
The unfortunate truth is that, rather than constituting a rebel grouping, "what if" history is eerily close to the mainstream of modern scholarship. The past 20 years has witnessed a brutal collapse in what was once called social history. The rigorous, data-based study of class, inequality, work patterns and gender relations has fallen away in the face of cultural history and post-modern inquiry.
Research into structures and processes, along with a search for explanation, is overshadowed by histories of understanding and meaning. In many cases this has led to a declining emphasis on the limitations that social context - class status, economic prospects, family networks - can place on the historical role of the individual. Instead, what we are offered in the postmodern world of contingency and irony is a series of biographical discourses in which one narrative is as valid as another. One history is as good as another and with it the blurring of factual, counter-factual and fiction. All history is "what if" history.
No doubt, new right legionaries such as Andrew Roberts and Simon Heffer would be appalled to be in the distinguished company of those postmodern bogeymen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. And they have partly atoned for their sins with a traditional Tory emphasis on the role of great men in history. For "what if" versions of the past posit the powerful individual at the heart of their histories: it is a story of what generals, presidents and revolutionaries did or did not do. The contribution of bureaucracies, ideas or social class is nothing to the personal fickleness of Josef Stalin or the constitution of Franz Ferdinand.
But it is surely the interaction between individual choices and historical context which is what governs the events of the past. As Karl Marx put it: "People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past."
Richard R. goes on to suggest that Hunt may be right. He takes as an example Victor Davis Hanson's article "The Fruits of Appeasement," in which Hanson suggests that in 1979 US President Carter should have responded to the hostage-takings in the Iranian revolution by threatening to wage all-out war against Iran. This suggestion overlooks completely, as he points out, the fact that the United States faced numerous very real constraints on the full exercise of its military power against revolutionary Iran, and is to this extent ahistorical. Scott Martens' post "Alternate Universe SF as a form of Intellectual Masturbation also makes some interesting points about the potentially non-left-wing nature of alternate history:
Hunt and Martens are correct that wider forces--social, political, economic--are always involved in major policy decisions. Hunt's concern that much counterfactual history is weightless, existing only to make certain political points, is quite true--Julie Birchill's article "Out of the rubble," written after 9/11 and claiming that her support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was justified by the presence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in liberated Afghanistan, is a case in point. Martens is quite right that many things can't happen simply because there is no plausible way for them to happen given the correlation of forces, like, for instance, a British Empire lasting to the early 21st century.
And yet. Reagan's election wasn't inevitable; it's plausible enough to say that if Carter was re-elected, or if another Republican was elected in Reagan's place, that support for the mujaheddin would have dropped off. Perhaps if Hinckley was a better shot? And while a continued British Empire was unlikely, particularly once the populations of the Indian and African possessions became mobile enough to demand equality (of income, of citizenship) with metropolitan Britons, it doesn't strike me as completely implausible that there might have been a federation of Britain and its smaller insular possessions with the dominions.
Hunt's article has caused a bit of debate on soc.history.what-if as to the utility of counterfactuals in history. Phil Edwards, at the top of the linked USENET thread, made a good point when he said, in an E-mail to Hunt, that
It's likely not possible to take counterfactuals very far, if only because historical study depends on the examination of documents of various kinds. By definition, we can't have any documents from the world where Hinckley was a presidential assassin, or the world where the British Imperial Federation includes citizens in Sydney, Saskatoon, and Sussex. It's possible, though, to use existing historical documents to ask "what if?", to examine in-depth the accuracy of one's historical assumptions and to imagine the sorts of changes that plausible shifts would have had. Even failures can be revelatory; Alison Brooks' Operation Sealion pages demonstrate in detail that a Nazi invasion of Britain in the Second World War would have failed, and why, incidentally revealing much about the relative force structures of the two powers and the underlying strengths of the British strategic position.
Moreover, despite the predominance of wider forces, individuals do matter. If, for instance, Napoleon had died of cholera as an infant and never rose to prominence in Revolutionary France, would the French Revolution have inevitably transmuted into quasi-Napoleonic imperialism, or might we have in France a long-established republic with its northeastern frontiers on the Rhine? If Hitler had drowned as a young child, would Nazis still have come to power in Germany with a different leader, or would Weimar Germany have developed differently? If Guiseppe Zangara had killed Roosevelt instead of Cermak back in 1933, would the United States have involved itself agaisnt fascism in Europe and the Pacific? Soemtimes, personalities do matter.
Outside the realm of rigourous historical study, of course, it is quite possible for counterfactuals to be simple fun, whether because the plausible historical divergence is taken to a point in time far beyond what any historian could comfortably conclude or because the historical divergence is implausible. Even so, it's possible to use a degree of rigour in constructing complex counterfactual scenarios and then to deploy these scenarios to study our world, to compare our world to a fictional world for historical study or for simple literary effect. Though I'm not a published scholar by any means, in my two detailed counterfactual world scenarios posted at the Alternate History Travel Guides, I've tried to do just that: Empires Earth was an effort to imagine what the world might be like if globalization proceeded not in the geopolitical context of the modern state system but within mercantilistic empires, while the much longer Tripartite Alliance Earth was intended as a dystopia (and, I admit, a way to come up with a semi-plausible Evil America).
Counterfactuals sloppily composed don't have much of a place outside of entertainment. Counterfactuals done consistently and plausibly, though, should be recognized as innovative contributions to history and literature.
if one combines the reported 40 000 English tourists travelling in France [. . .] with the 40 to 50 000 Britons some have alleged were settled permanently across the Channel, the French were faced with the prospect of almost 100 000 British invading their territory each year. [. . . T]here were some 200 000 Huguenots residing in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and [. . .] the outbreak of the French Revolution added to these [. . .A] pproximately 300 000 temporarily or permanently dispersed people [lived] on the ‘wrong’ side of the Channel (Eagles 98-99).
Colley's argument remains basically unchallenged by Eagles' position, since Eagles concedes that there isn't much sign that the Francophilia of the elite aristocratic and mercantile minorities penetrated to the level of the British masses. Nonetheless, in reading Eagles' story, I was strongly reminded of Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, which described how, at the same time as England's wealthiest populations demonstrated their Francophilia, the elite populations of non-Francophone France--in the Germanic east, in Celtic Brittany, in the lands of the langue d'oc--were assimilated to French culture. Francophile English and French provincials reacted in much the same way to the prestige of the French language, French literature and theatre, and French fashion. Yet, the internal peripheries of France were in the end assimilated into France; the state of France's minority languages is proof of this. England, and Britain were not assimilated. Why is this? How did Britain differ from provincial France? Could the fates of the two regions have differed, and if so, how?
It was appropriate, in light of this essay, that while visiting Castrovalva I noticed that Richard R, had written a brief commentary on Tristram Hunt's article in The Guardian criticizing alternate histories:
The conservatives who contribute to this literature portray themselves as battling against the dominant but flawed ideologies of Marxist and Whig history. Such analyses of the past, they say, never allow for the role of accident and serendipity. Instead, the past is presented as a series of milestones in an advance towards communism or liberal democracy. It is the calling of these modern iconoclasts to reintroduce the crooked timber of humanity back into history.
The unfortunate truth is that, rather than constituting a rebel grouping, "what if" history is eerily close to the mainstream of modern scholarship. The past 20 years has witnessed a brutal collapse in what was once called social history. The rigorous, data-based study of class, inequality, work patterns and gender relations has fallen away in the face of cultural history and post-modern inquiry.
Research into structures and processes, along with a search for explanation, is overshadowed by histories of understanding and meaning. In many cases this has led to a declining emphasis on the limitations that social context - class status, economic prospects, family networks - can place on the historical role of the individual. Instead, what we are offered in the postmodern world of contingency and irony is a series of biographical discourses in which one narrative is as valid as another. One history is as good as another and with it the blurring of factual, counter-factual and fiction. All history is "what if" history.
No doubt, new right legionaries such as Andrew Roberts and Simon Heffer would be appalled to be in the distinguished company of those postmodern bogeymen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. And they have partly atoned for their sins with a traditional Tory emphasis on the role of great men in history. For "what if" versions of the past posit the powerful individual at the heart of their histories: it is a story of what generals, presidents and revolutionaries did or did not do. The contribution of bureaucracies, ideas or social class is nothing to the personal fickleness of Josef Stalin or the constitution of Franz Ferdinand.
But it is surely the interaction between individual choices and historical context which is what governs the events of the past. As Karl Marx put it: "People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past."
Richard R. goes on to suggest that Hunt may be right. He takes as an example Victor Davis Hanson's article "The Fruits of Appeasement," in which Hanson suggests that in 1979 US President Carter should have responded to the hostage-takings in the Iranian revolution by threatening to wage all-out war against Iran. This suggestion overlooks completely, as he points out, the fact that the United States faced numerous very real constraints on the full exercise of its military power against revolutionary Iran, and is to this extent ahistorical. Scott Martens' post "Alternate Universe SF as a form of Intellectual Masturbation also makes some interesting points about the potentially non-left-wing nature of alternate history:
Hunt is absolutely right to see a reactionary agenda in a theory of history driven by personalities and ideas. I note the tension between the idealism of old right and the social Darwinism of the new right implicit in Professor Hunt's thesis. History, we are told, is arbitrary. Britain might have kept the empire had it been ruled by the right men with the right ideas. At the same time, we are told that poverty and social inequality (and sometimes sexism, racism and nationalism) are inevitable consequences of human nature and that nothing can be done about them. Leftist ideology has traditionally been different: History is the result of the structure of human societies, and the role of men and ideas is inevitably constrained by that structure. Britain might, in some alternate universe, have kept the empire, but it could not have kept it as it was. The forces that tore it apart cannot be ignored by merely asking "what if?" And, people are constrained by those same social structures rather than by an intrinsic nature. This theory of history is not deterministic and is no less suited to SF than idealism. It is also a good deal more liberating than thinking that events are the work of "great men."
Hunt and Martens are correct that wider forces--social, political, economic--are always involved in major policy decisions. Hunt's concern that much counterfactual history is weightless, existing only to make certain political points, is quite true--Julie Birchill's article "Out of the rubble," written after 9/11 and claiming that her support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was justified by the presence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in liberated Afghanistan, is a case in point. Martens is quite right that many things can't happen simply because there is no plausible way for them to happen given the correlation of forces, like, for instance, a British Empire lasting to the early 21st century.
And yet. Reagan's election wasn't inevitable; it's plausible enough to say that if Carter was re-elected, or if another Republican was elected in Reagan's place, that support for the mujaheddin would have dropped off. Perhaps if Hinckley was a better shot? And while a continued British Empire was unlikely, particularly once the populations of the Indian and African possessions became mobile enough to demand equality (of income, of citizenship) with metropolitan Britons, it doesn't strike me as completely implausible that there might have been a federation of Britain and its smaller insular possessions with the dominions.
Hunt's article has caused a bit of debate on soc.history.what-if as to the utility of counterfactuals in history. Phil Edwards, at the top of the linked USENET thread, made a good point when he said, in an E-mail to Hunt, that
[w]hat fascinates me about alternative history - and about much of the discussion on the newsgroup - is precisely "the interaction between individual choices and historical context", in your words. On one hand, given an identifiable point of divergence, how much difference does a particular small change make - how far do the ripples spread before they're damped? On the other, assuming that a noticeably different chain of events can be plausibly constructed, what does this tell us about the (known) historical context - how solidly-grounded does the actual outcome appear to have been?
It's likely not possible to take counterfactuals very far, if only because historical study depends on the examination of documents of various kinds. By definition, we can't have any documents from the world where Hinckley was a presidential assassin, or the world where the British Imperial Federation includes citizens in Sydney, Saskatoon, and Sussex. It's possible, though, to use existing historical documents to ask "what if?", to examine in-depth the accuracy of one's historical assumptions and to imagine the sorts of changes that plausible shifts would have had. Even failures can be revelatory; Alison Brooks' Operation Sealion pages demonstrate in detail that a Nazi invasion of Britain in the Second World War would have failed, and why, incidentally revealing much about the relative force structures of the two powers and the underlying strengths of the British strategic position.
Moreover, despite the predominance of wider forces, individuals do matter. If, for instance, Napoleon had died of cholera as an infant and never rose to prominence in Revolutionary France, would the French Revolution have inevitably transmuted into quasi-Napoleonic imperialism, or might we have in France a long-established republic with its northeastern frontiers on the Rhine? If Hitler had drowned as a young child, would Nazis still have come to power in Germany with a different leader, or would Weimar Germany have developed differently? If Guiseppe Zangara had killed Roosevelt instead of Cermak back in 1933, would the United States have involved itself agaisnt fascism in Europe and the Pacific? Soemtimes, personalities do matter.
Outside the realm of rigourous historical study, of course, it is quite possible for counterfactuals to be simple fun, whether because the plausible historical divergence is taken to a point in time far beyond what any historian could comfortably conclude or because the historical divergence is implausible. Even so, it's possible to use a degree of rigour in constructing complex counterfactual scenarios and then to deploy these scenarios to study our world, to compare our world to a fictional world for historical study or for simple literary effect. Though I'm not a published scholar by any means, in my two detailed counterfactual world scenarios posted at the Alternate History Travel Guides, I've tried to do just that: Empires Earth was an effort to imagine what the world might be like if globalization proceeded not in the geopolitical context of the modern state system but within mercantilistic empires, while the much longer Tripartite Alliance Earth was intended as a dystopia (and, I admit, a way to come up with a semi-plausible Evil America).
Counterfactuals sloppily composed don't have much of a place outside of entertainment. Counterfactuals done consistently and plausibly, though, should be recognized as innovative contributions to history and literature.
