A History of What Could Have Been

For historians, counterfactualism and the attention it pays to what did not happen is an odd, dark realm – often silly, sometimes dangerous, and almost always problematic.

 Occasionally it leads to entertaining name-calling: EP Thompson’s dismissal of it as “Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit” is colourful enough to have had a life beyond the book in which is first appeared, 1978’s The Poverty of Theory. 

 In their 2021 book A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been, Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou acknowledge the risks, but point out that conventional historical methods are also not immune to what one might call a hindsight bias. In other words, the inferences that emerge from our historical research are shaped not just by our knowledge, but the contexts within which we operate. Questioning such inferences through “what ifs” is different from unrestrained speculation.

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