What is worse, counterfactual speculations spring naturally from deeply conservative assumptions about what makes history tick. Like bestselling popular histories, counterfactuals usually take as their subjects war, biography or an old-school history of technology that emphasises the importance of the inventor. (This is part of why Evans termed counterfactualism ‘a form of intellectual atavism’.) Popular counterfactuals dwell on the outcomes of military conflicts (the Civil War and the Second World War are disproportionately popular), or ponder what would have happened if a leader with the fame of Hitler had (or, in some cases, hadn’t) been assassinated. These kinds of counterfactual speculations assign an overwhelming importance to political and military leaders – a focus that seems regressive to many historians who consider historical events as the result of complicated social and cultural processes, not the choices of a small group of ‘important’ people.
The ‘wars and great men’ approach to history not only appears intellectually bankrupt to many historians, it also excludes all those whose voices from the past historians have laboured to recover in recent decades. Women – as individuals, or as a group – almost never appear, and social, cultural, and environmental history are likewise absent. Evans, for his part, thinks this is because complex cultural topics are not easy to understand through the simplifying lens of the ‘what if’. He uses that resistance as evidence against the validity of the practice itself: ‘You seldom find counterfactuals about topics such as the transition from the classical sensibility to the Romantic at the end of the 18th century, or the emergence of modern industry, or the French revolution, because they’re just too obviously complicated to be susceptible of simplistic “what-if” speculation.’
Despite all these criticisms, a few historians have recently been making persuasive arguments that counterfactualism can be good – for readers, for students, and for writers. Historical speculation, they say, can be a healthy exercise for historians looking to think hard about their own motives and methods. Counterfactuals, if done well, can force a super-meticulous look at the way historians use evidence. And counterfactuals can encourage readers to think about the contingent nature of history – an exercise that can help build empathy and diminish feelings of national, cultural, and racial exceptionalism. Was the US always destined (as its 19th-century ideologues believed) to occupy the middle swath of the North American continent, from sea to shining sea? Or is its national geography the result of a series of decisions and compromises – some of which, if reversed, could have led to a different outcome? The latter view leaves more space for analysis, more chance to examine how power worked during expansion; it’s also the realm of counterfactuals.