Editing Counterfactual history (section)

==Development==
An early book of counterfactual histories is ''[[If It Had Happened Otherwise]]'' (1931) which features "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle at Gettysburg", by [[Winston Churchill]], about a fictional Confederate victory at the [[Battle of Gettysburg]] (1863).<ref>{{Cite web |last=Churchill |first=Winston |author-link=Winston Churchill |title=If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg |url=http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=674 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090105132718/http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=674 |archive-date=January 5, 2009 |publisher=[[International Churchill Society|The Churchill Centre]]}}</ref> As a text of counterfactual histories written by historians, ''If It Had Happened Otherwise'' contains works of [[Alternate history|alternative history]]—fictional reinterpretations of historical events—because the narrative tone tends to whimsy, and offers neither historical analysis nor the logic behind such ''What if?'' scenarios.

In ''Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History'', [[Robert Fogel]] applied quantitative methods to imagine the U.S. economy of 1890 had there been no railroads.<ref name="eh.net">{{Cite web |last=Davis |first=Lance E. |author-link=Lance E. Davis |date=1 July 2000 |title=Project 2001: Significant Works in Twentieth-Century Economic History Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History [Review] |url=https://eh.net/book_reviews/railroads-and-american-economic-growth-essays-in-econometric-history/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060228010214/http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/davis.shtml |archive-date=28 February 2006 |website=[[Economic History Association]]}}</ref> That in the absence of the railroad in the U.S., the great system of canals would have been expanded and the roads would have been paved and improved into a reliable transport system; both improvements would have diminished the social and economic importance of the railroad, because “the level of per capita income achieved by January 1, 1890 would have been reached by March 31, 1890, if railroads had never been invented.”<ref name="eh.net" />

Few further attempts to bring counterfactual history into the world of academia were made until the 1991 publication of ''[[Plausible Worlds|Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences]]'' by the Cambridge sociologist [[Geoffrey Hawthorn]], who carefully explored three different counterfactual scenarios.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Smoler |first=Frederic |date=September 1999 |title=Past Tense |url=http://www.americanheritage.com/content/past-tense |journal=[[American Heritage (magazine)|American Heritage]] |volume=50 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220504140952/https://www.americanheritage.com/past-tense |archive-date=4 May 2022 |number=5}}</ref> This work helped inspire ''Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals'' (1997), a collection of essays exploring different scenarios by a number of historians, edited by the historian [[Niall Ferguson]]. Ferguson has become a significant advocate of counterfactual history, using counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to [[Historical determinism|deterministic theories of history]] such as [[Marxism]], and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly different modern world. A series of [[What If? (essays)|"What If?"]] books edited by [[Robert Cowley]] presented dozens of essays by historians or prominent writers about "how a slight turn of fate at a decisive moment could have changed the very annals of time."<ref name="Arnold">{{Cite news |last=Arnold |first=Martin |author-link=Martin Arnold (journalist) |date=December 21, 2000 |title=Making books: The 'What Ifs' that fascinate |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/21/books/making-books-the-what-ifs-that-fascinate.html?src=pm |access-date=25 June 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220403205859/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/21/books/making-books-the-what-ifs-that-fascinate.html?src=pm |archive-date=3 April 2022}}</ref>

Some scholars argue that a counterfactual is not as much a matter of what happened in the past but it is the disagreement about which past events were most significant. For example, William Thompson employs a sequence of counterfactuals for eight lead economies that have driven [[globalization]] processes for almost a thousand years. From [[Song dynasty]] in China to [[Genoa]], [[Venice]], [[Spain]], [[Portugal]], the [[Netherlands]], [[United Kingdom|Britain]], and the [[United States]], and claims that each actor in succession played an unusually critical role in creating a structure of leadership that became increasingly global in scope across time.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Thompson |first=William R. |date=May 2010 |title=The Lead Economy Sequence in World Politics (From Sung China to the United States): Selected Counterfactuals |url=https://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/126971/ |journal=Journal of Globalization Studies |volume=1 |issue=1 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211028035104/https://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/126971/ |archive-date=28 October 2021}}</ref>

===Differences from alternate history===
Counterfactual history is neither [[historical revisionism]] nor [[alternate history]].

Counterfactual history distinguishes itself through its interest in the very incident that is being negated by the counterfactual, thus seeking to evaluate the event's relative historical importance. Historians produce arguments subsequent changes in history, outlining each in broad terms only, since the main focus is on the importance and impact of the negated event.

An alternate history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event. A fiction writer is thus free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history.

An example of a counterfactual question would be: "What if the [[Pearl Harbor attack]] did not happen?"; whereas an alternate history writer would focus on a possible series of events arising therefrom.

The line is sometimes blurred as historians may invent more detailed timelines as illustrations of their ideas about the types of changes that might have occurred. But it is usually clear what general types of consequences the author thinks are reasonable to suppose would have been likely to occur, and what specific details are included in an imagined timeline only for illustrative purposes.

The line is further blurred by novelists such as [[Kim Stanley Robinson]], whose alternate-history novel ''[[The Years of Rice and Salt]]'' has a character talking of historians' use of counterfactuals, within the novel's alternate history. He dismisses this as "a useless exercise".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Brooke |first=Keith |date=16 February 2002 |title=Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt – an infinity plus review |url=http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/riceandsalt.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220403204929/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/riceandsalt.htm |archive-date=3 April 2022 |website=[[Infinity Plus]]}}</ref>