Name: More What If?
ISBN: 9780330487252

Robert Cowley

More What If?

Gavin

Little counterfactuals involving single decisions in single lives that would (probably) have had vast effects on the present world. Needed this book because, at my school, the big historical cliches - Hastings - were divorced from their effects. Had Socrates died before meeting Plato, two thousand years of persuasive anti-democratic thought might have been prevented; had Zheng He just kept going, a Confucian America without a divine mandate to convert and subjugate, and an overwhelmed, boxed-in and thus united pre-colonial Europe might have resulted. 

  It may be coincidental, but it is suggestive nonetheless that the interest among serious historians in counterfactual analysis basically corresponds with the rise of a dramatically new way of looking at the physics of complex systems, known popularly as chaos theory.


They are also just great stories, cf. Adam Gopnik's

  It is the aim of all academic historians in our time to drain as much drama from history as is consistent with the facts; and it is the goal of popular historians to add as much drama to history as is consistent with the facts, or can be made to seem so.
  


This is the former people doing the latter work. Damn good fun, and maybe valuable in the absence of proper modelling.

More What If?

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