Counterfactual

Apparently, "counterfactual" is the historian word for "what if scenario". I bring this up because I recently finished reading What If?, a collection of essays by various military historians on how a different outcome in a specific event might have changed history.

It's a book that unless you are fairly interested in history, and specifically, military history, probably has limited appeal. Fortunately, I've got two history majors for parents, so I guess enough of that got passed on genetically to make it interesting to me. Plus, I used to read a lot of Harry Turtledove's books, which were almost always What If? style historical novels, though usually taken to an extreme level (Aliens invade during World War 2! Racists travel back to the Civil War to give the South M-16s! That kind of lunacy).

In this case, the authors all take what is apparently the accepted tack for counterfactual arguments: make only small and plausible changes, and recognize that over time, the previous circumstances may wind up happening anyway. This gets brought up in a discussion of what might have happened had the Spanish Armada been better able to deal with the English fireships, perhaps due to a different wind that day. The point Geoffrey Parker makes is that while the loss of the Armada signaled the decline of Spain and the Habsburgs, and the rise of England, a victory wouldn't necessarily erase all of that future (in part due to all the Habsburg inbreeding leaving a lack of suitable heirs within a generation or two).

The thing all the writers do that I greatly appreciate is give a quick rundown of how whatever event they're discussing actually went, before going into their spiel about how if x happened, y would not have happened. I may enjoy history, but I'm not so well-versed in it that a quick recap doesn't do a world of good for getting you into the subject.

I thought the first chapter was one of the more interesting, if just for the implications William McNeill suggests. He looks at what might have happened if the Assyrians hadn't been hit by a horrible plague as they prepared to conquer Jerusalem in 701 B.C. His argument is that the people in the town would have been captured, taken back into the heart of the Assyrian Empire, and that within a few decades, the people would have abandoned their faith, since their God had failed to protect them, and without Judiasm, no Christianity, no Islam. Pretty impressive swing, though as he notes, it creates a world so foreign from ours it's practically impossible to try to describe it. So he doesn't. Still, it's remarkable to think that a walled city, managing to withstand a powerful army, even if only for a few generations (as Jerusalem was eventually conquered, and its people moved to Babylon in 586 B.C.), could change things that much.

There's other chapters as well, one about roughly ten different ways the colonies could have lost the American Revolution (and Sam Adams' name keeps coming up. Apparently he wasn't too bright when it came to politics or the military), or what happens if the Japanese had been a little more suspicious about uncoded messages about Midway Island needing a re-supply of water, or if the Mongols didn't force everyone to come back home to choose their new ruler (because the Mongol general Sabotai was about three seconds away from taking Vienna, and there wouldn't have been any stopping him at that point). So on and so on.

If nothing else, it's fun to read about all the screw-ups and tactical blunders that enable leaders to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Whether it's impatience, or an unwillingness to share credit, or work together, or even in General Marshall's case with China, trying to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict.