Timothy Burke:	I wanted to talk today about this backdoor into history as a discipline that I've ended up finding through teaching a class about counterfactuals, and I think it's not only turns out to be a really interesting funhouse mirror for the students who take it and for me too, frankly, into how history works as a discipline, but I do think, in terms of what Erin said, that it turns out to be pretty illustrative of why history departments in academia are frequently positioned right on the borderlands of the social sciences and the humanities.
	If you look over our peer institutions, it's close to a 50/50 flip as to whether a history department will be in a humanities division or in a social science division. I think that actually reflects the professional scholarly work and interests of most historians in the discipline.
	Counterfactuals are in some disciplines just a straight-up thing that of course you either do them, or you're interested in them. Analytic philosophy, for example, in its wonderfully difficult-to-understand way, if you're not an analytic philosopher, has long taken seriously the proposition that if you're going to say, "If A, then B," you can actually know and rigorously think about the other side of that. If not A, what then, and that can actually be talked about rigorously. You can actually understand what's inside of the opposite of what did happen on the other side of the if/then.
	Whereas psychology, for example, it's less about exploring what could have happened, what we think about when we say, "If only," and more about just understanding that "if only" is a fundamental thing that human beings think about, that that's a fundamental feature of our cognition, both at the level where we are very carefully, rationally working through problems, but also in the way that we far less consciously appraise the world around us.
	There are disciplines where, to say, "Oh, you're interested in counterfactuals," there's no issue. You just go right ahead. Popular culture likes counterfactuals. I could fill ten slides. This is a map from The Man in the High Castle, the famous Philip K. Dick science fiction novel, which actually Amazon has made into a series. I haven't watched it yet. You can go ahead and spoil it, because I know what happens anyway. Sliding Doors, if you've ever seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie as a kind of what-if about one person.
	It's a very, very common interest both in terms of alternate histories, things that are really explicitly historical, but also just as a conventional storytelling device, showing us two stories about a person that hinge on one decision.
	Historians feel differently. Historians acknowledge ... I mean, just I should say this at the outset, and this'll become important as I go along. Historians know that a counterfactual is embedded in every argument about causality. Anytime I say, "This is why the United States went to war," or "This is why World War One happened," if you were to kind of corner a historian and say, "But there's a counterfactual in there," because you're having to argue about all the things that didn't happen, but could've happened, they say, "Sure."
	But what historians, when they don't like counterfactuals, mean is, "I'm not going to talk about that." About the what-ifs. The what-ifs are embedded in and implicit in every statement I make about why things happen, but there's nothing interesting I can or should say about the things that didn't happen that could've happened.
	These are some of the more famous cases. Every time you read an essay by a historian talking about counterfactuals, this quote from E.P. Thompson, a very famous social historian who wrote about the history of the English working class, very famous thinker on the left, is invariably going to come up. Although, if you actually read the book that it comes from, it's a book called The Poverty of Theory, which was once upon a time sort of hot shit in the academy, and now nobody reads it. Historians still do. It was more or less E.P. Thompson dissing every left theorist and thinker that he disliked. He managed to get in there along the way a kind of dual dissing of what-if history and Althusser, which is kind of a neat trick.
	This is a more common quote from the British historian E.H. Carr, where he basically said, "You can do these things if you want, but they're childish. They're parlor games. They're not worthy of a scholar, and they're not worthy of a serious intellectual thinking about history."
	Then, just to show it's not an old thing, Richard Evans, who is a historian of Europe, wrote a piece in the Guardian last year, where he said, "I can't believe that these stupid what-if things are coming back." He's talking about the resurgence of an interest in what-ifs focused on World War One, and he more or less said the same thing that Carr did. They're silly, they're a distraction, they're not worthy of serious thought.
	So what's wrong with them? Well, this is a really great book that I recommend actually to anybody, especially in fact maybe to staff who are trying to figure out how to deal with faculty. Lamont's a sociologist, and so what she did is she studied a lot of panel competitions where faculty who didn't know each other were being thrown together to decide who should get an award, a grant, and how people from different disciplines built ad hoc understandings of what was excellent. What Lamont found is that some disciplines, when you throw them together as strangers, are instantly high-consensus disciplines. They don't even have to talk about what they think is excellent, and that some disciplines are instantly low-consensus disciplines, that you'll never get two to three strangers in that discipline who will agree with each other, that they'll almost invariably contradict each other.
	Economists, no surprise here probably, were one of the high-consensus discipline. A low-consensus discipline, scholars in literary studies, cultural anthropologists. Philosophers, she said she couldn't even chart. They were like ... They weren't high-consensus or low-consensus. They more or less just went off in the corner and talked to each other because they couldn't talk to anybody else.
	Historians were actually the second highest-consensus discipline that she found, and she thought that was really hard at first to understand, because they didn't necessarily agree about anything otherwise. Their politics could be very different, their periods of study could be different, their personal sensibilities could be different, but they tended to come together very quickly on what was good work and bad work, and it was because they all had an agreement about good work having a particular relationship to evidence.
	It didn't mean that the historians saw themselves as objective or dedicated to some rigorous sort of more or less scientific notion of truth. They all agreed also that they were engaged in interpretation, that their own interests, their own arguments, their own politics strongly influenced what they were doing, and that was okay. You didn't have to apologize for that. But they did agree that everybody ought to be working with evidence, archives, oral history, archeological evidence, and that there was a particular craft to working with evidence.
	The problem was, they said, "Look, if you're doing a counterfactual, the problem historically has been for historians, that there's no evidence of that." You can't look at the archival papers of the things that didn't happen. You can't interview the people who would have existed. You can't look at the archeological evidence that never was deposited or created. So you should stay away from it. In particular, when I show my students these ... You know, the first third of the class is just historians saying why not to do this. Again and again what they found, what I've noticed, is basically a warning against imagination, a notion that you don't want to be involved in an enterprise where you have to imagine without the safety net of evidence something that never occurred.
	Especially what you don't want to be doing in that respect, why you don't want to be doing that, is you'll just end up arguing for something that you are inclined to wish had happened anyway or wish hadn't happened, that you'll be driven to someplace that has no relationship to evidence.
	Now there are some historians over the years, and increasingly more and more in the last 15 years, who ventured out and said, "Okay. Under certain conditions, it may be okay." Niall Ferguson, who's a quite right-wing historian, developed a fondness for counterfactuals fairly early in his career. I think when his politics were a little less full-throated.
	He edited a volume called Virtual History. He wrote a really wrong introduction to it that set out his rules for doing counterfactuals, in which he said, "If you're a historian, whether you have my politics or not, you can do them, but only if you do them the Niall Ferguson way." The Niall Ferguson way, he said, is this, "You are allowed to do them if you can find evidence, archival or otherwise, that a particular individual actually considered doing something other than that which they did."
	In a sense, actually, if you can find them reflecting on their internal psychological experience of decision making, or if you can find, let's say, records of a president's cabinet meeting, in which the president says, "We might do this, or we might do that, or we might do that." Then Ferguson said, "Then it's fine, because then we know people actually thought about doing the thing that they didn't do. They actually discussed it. There's evidence. There's something there." Now, it does turn out that that means most of the time you're talking about famous people, so-called great men, usually, and Ferguson's fine with that. That's okay. That might even be part of the point of it.
	There's a second group, and it's interesting. This is sometimes historians and it's sometimes sympathetic people from other disciplines looking at what historians do. In either case, people say, again, "If you're going to talk about causality, you are doing counterfactuals," that there is therefore a benefit, an intellectual benefit, to making them explicit rather than making them implicit, that you will understand your argument better if you unbundle it a little bit and if you explore in some fashion, evidence-driven or otherwise, the counterfactuals that are embedded inside your causality, that you benefit from that, your audience benefits from that, you develop a more persuasive historical argument. It's a kind of road test. Your causality gets better if you think about it explicitly and you write about it explicitly.
	That's a pretty common argument. That's become more common. More and more historians are willing to credit that on some level. You can even find, frankly, a lot of historians who do that without explicitly saying that's what they're doing, e.g. when you read what they actually say about causality, there's a counterfactual there. They just don't say it's a counterfactual. Some historians have actually chased those down pretty explicitly without necessarily consciously flagging that that's what they're doing. I'll come back to an example of that in a little bit.
	All right. The third argument. This is our alum, Ben Wurgaft. Anybody here teach him? 2000? Philosophy, literary studies, art history. Cool guy. He wrote a really interesting piece that my students actually love where he talked about the European intellectual Walter Benjamin, and he talked about particularly the end of Benjamin's life. Benjamin is a left-wing intellectual, romantic rock star kind of figure in the sense that many of us have read his pieces. You kind of swoon over them. You cite them a lot. They're really kind of ... They're often inspiring to people, especially when they're in graduate school.
	A part it of is the way that Benjamin's life ended, which is to say he was fleeing Nazism, like a lot of Jewish intellectuals in Europe did. He gets to Spain. He thinks they're not going to be allowed to cross the border and that they're going to be sent back under Nazi control, and he commits suicide. Another member of his group that was traveling together tries to commit suicide and lives. It turns out that they're allowed to go the next day, so he would have escaped.
	What Ben Wurgaft's piece is about is saying, well, look, he says, "I need to know how much I love Benjamin's work because of that tragic ending." In other words, does it add an air of romance, of a kind of tragic beauty to his life? Am I drawn to him because of that? "The only way I can think about that," Ben says, "is to think about the what-ifs." What if he'd come to the United States along with a number of other intellectuals that he was colleagues with or friends with and then had wrote a couple of desultory essays about television and had mostly been grouchy about how bad Hollywood was, or had otherwise not continued what looked like the trajectory of his thinking in Europe? What if he'd been a different person once he got here or anywhere else? What if he was less interesting or stellar? Would I think about him the same way?
	Then Ben also looks at a number of other people who have also done the same exercise. What he suggests in the end is, look, this is just good for you. It's good for you. It might not even be good for your audience. It's a good exercise in thinking about why you maybe need or want certain stories in history to end in particular ways, come out as they did.
	Catherine Gallagher has written ... She was on a major project and then stopped it, but she's got some very interesting essays that came out of it. She's a literary critic, but she's written very similarly about counterfactuals and the American Civil War, where she says, "Look, I don't want any part, in a sense, of a history that says slavery could have continued." She says, "I need to believe that it was doomed in the mid-nineteenth century in America and elsewhere," and she said, "Once I know that about myself, I know something important about my ability to consider counterfactuals, but also my need for history to be understood and narrated as it often is." She says, again, "It's a self-knowledge exercise." Historians aren't so wild on this argument, but I like it.
	Okay. More recently, as some historians have set out to say, "Okay, yes you can do this," they have ... Various ones have gone beyond Ferguson's rules and said, "Okay, we're not going to be quite as obsessed with the idea that you've got to document that a particular individual actually thought about doing something different." They do sort of say, "Look, if you're going to stay a historian and do one of these things, here are some rules you should follow." This anthology, Unmaking the West, has a pretty wide range of scholarly historians writing short essays. It's very interesting. Actually I'd say about a fourth of them break the rules, and the introduction to the volume said, "We told these guys these were these rules. They didn't do it. We think their essays kind of suck, but we're going to put them in the volume anyway."
	They say basically, "If you want to do it like a historian should do it." They say, "Stay close to an actual event. Don't trace out ... Don't do the kind of classic formulation, for want of a nail, the horse was lost, for want of the horse, et cetera et cetera et cetera, until you scale up to the battle, the war, the country, the whole history. Stay close. You know, don't go farther than the horse. If you've got to, maybe go as far as the messenger, but don't trace that whole thing. Stick with one what-if. Don't do three or four or five. You know, try to just stick with one. Um, stick to what you can find some evidence for. It doesn't have to be documentary evidence that a particular individual thought about other things, but some evidence for the claims you're making about the what-if, about the, the other plausible history. And try not to change too much. If you change too much, they say you're a science fiction writer or something. You're talking about things that just aren't seemly for historians to deal with."
	All right. So when you look at when historians have set out to write counterfactuals, what do they write? Many of them follow rules roughly like those Tetlock, Parker, and Lebow rules. All right. Many, many, many, many of them are World War Two and Civil War ones. It's irresistible. This is where popular culture and those historians who do write counterfactuals overlap nearly perfectly. Everybody does admit the question of what if Hitler won the Civil War and the numerous ... I mean, the World War Two. That's actually ... That's the science fiction part of it, right? Actually, there is one like that, now that I think about it, but ...
	The what if he won World War Two, that, and those break down to things that are, where again, people obsess over very singular things. What if the Nazis had not allowed British forces to escape at Dunkirk? What if the Nazis had handled the war on the Eastern Front differently. Any one of those you can pile a stack of essays from historians and then also scholarly historians in the academy and also amateur historians who have often done the same research and have the same dedication. Equally the American Civil War, just huge, huge ... Again, you could pile tons just on this alone. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, where people just say, "What if, what if?"
	Military history generally attracts. You can see why, because if you're concerned about evidence, it's the easiest thing to think about, where you can say, "Okay. Here's one battle. This battle could turn out differently." Although, I think relatively few battles when you look at military history where that's actually plausible. Less than you'd think. But there's still plenty where you can say, "I can see it. I can see where if you just point the cannons that way, or you don't charge down there, or, you know, the dumb general gets encephalitis three days beforehand, and you win, and then everything changes."
	Histories of famous leaders, especially deaths and assassinations, really common, because you can often again see the role of chance, and you can see where a single thing could change. If only he'd gone downstairs ten minutes later. If only he had dodged. Whatever.
	Political history. Elections. Fairly common, because again you can see often how close on a close election how things could have been different. If only they had spent a little more money there. If only they had had a better model here. If only, if only.
	Then sometimes histories of technology and invention, but it's usually in that kind of great man-ish form. What if Edison had done this. What if Tesla and Edison, what if their rivalry had turned out slightly differently. That's a favorite one. It's not so much the much more complicated question, say, of what if the cotton gin had never come into existence, because the things that are required to unthink a technology totally are much more complicated than a single particular invention or rivalry.
	These are ones nobody writes. Nobody writes about non-Western individuals and societies, pretty much, when they write counterfactuals. Even the pretty straightforward, like what if Shaka the emperor of the Zulus had done something differently. You just can't find it. People in my field, African history, do not write these.
	Nobody really writes about gender. In fact, the number of counterfactuals, students of mine were looking for this, that are about women, again, even as individuals, there are almost none of them. Very, very few.
	Generally, people who write social history don't write counterfactuals, period, when they write about large populations, groups, collectivities, how they live. History from below is not done as counterfactual history.
	Cultural history, and even the things that you could think of that would be events, almost nobody writes. Nobody says, "What if the camera had pointed down to Elvis's hips on Ed Sullivan?" Nobody does those for the most part. If they are done, they're not done by historians. They're done in cultural criticism.
	Nobody does environmental histories that are counterfactual, really. The closest I can think of is Jared Diamond has a book called Collapse. That's a sort of follow-up to Guns, Germs and Steel, that's essentially a counterfactual in the sense that it says societies which are heading on the road to environmental collapse on occasion do something to avert that. It's implied that you therefore can avoid it. It's not determined.
	Economic history, people do write, sometimes not in history but in other contexts, histories of, if only this policy had been different in the economy or sometimes in other domains, in social domains. Things would have turned out differently. Business case studies are sometimes explicitly counterfactual. They're always at least implicitly so. Why did the new Coke fail? Well, but it could have not failed if there hadn't been a new Coke.
	I want to show you ... This is sort of where if you read works of historians looking for counterfactuals, you'll find them. This is an example I often point out in my honors seminar. We're reading ... We often read the work of Walter Rodney. This is a book that's actually read throughout Africa because it was available cheap for a long time, but it's also a really good synthesis history of the slave trade and of European colonialism, so how Europe underdeveloped Africa. Rodney was a Guyanese labor activist who was assassinated eventually, but he was one of the important early figures in the African diaspora to establish himself as a scholarly historian studying Africa.
	Rodney has this interesting thing going through the whole book in which he says, on one hand, as a nationalist ... He was both a nationalist and a really strong structuralist Marxist. As a nationalist, he says, "Look, I'm confident that had there not been the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism, that African societies would have developed towards modernity, and their modernity would have been the modernity that we all know in the twentieth century. You know, it would have been industrial, it would have been capitalist, it would have been scientifically and technologically sophisticated." Now, he also adds, because he was a structuralist Marxist, "And then there would have been a proletarian revolution and socialism." It would have worked the same way if there had been no Europe.
	But then he also says, "Industrial capitalism needed the slave trade and colonialism to achieve modernity with Western domination." Both of those are kind of counterfactual statements. Had this not happened, had there not been colonialism, Africa would have developed. Had there not been the slave trade and colonialism, the West would not have achieved industrial modernity. He never makes either of them explicit, and it's probably because to make them explicit would cause him an enormous problem, intellectually and ideologically. He'd have to think, first of all, which of the two he means, and either one of them has some complicated and troubling implications. For example, if it turns out it's the second, then you're kind of arguing that Africans, to achieve this industrial, scientific, capitalist modernity, they would have had to have a slave trade or colonialism on others.
	So it's not surprising that Rodney doesn't make this explicit, but the reason is not because he's a historian that doesn't like counterfactuals. It's because the counterfactual is sort of dangerous to some of the arguments that he wants to make about causality.
	Okay. Real quick, and then I'm really keen to have questions and comments and thoughts. Here are three thoughts that I often share with my students when we do this class. The first might be that thinking about counterfactuals for historians is good in the Wurgaft sense, and in the sense that it actually makes us have to think about why we're scared of imagination. We're not scared of interpretation. We're not scared of the notion that we're not scientists. Historians actively embrace that.
	If there's anything that drives historians up the wall, especially in encountering undergraduates, is the proposition that we often see in our undergraduates, even here, that history is about sort of finding out what really happened in the past, subtracting bias, and whatever kind of solute at the bottom of the jar is left, that's truth, right? Historians know, look, no, no, the bias is the data, all right? The interpretation is the way that all human beings live and make sense of the world. It's very much a similar position that a lot of humanists take on language, that you can't subtract language to get to some pure way of communicating, that language is communication. It's the real thing. Same thing, in some sense.
	Historians don't like this idea that they'd have to fly without the net of evidence. I actually think it's a good exercise to try, and I've always been taken by the historian/literary scholar Richard Slotkin's argument that every historian, in their graduate training, should have to write one work of historical fiction. The reason, as Slotkin says, so that you understand what fiction can do that you can't. Now, it doesn't mean that he thinks that you should embrace fiction. He also doesn't frankly expect that your fictions are going to be any good. But that you might discover that fiction has a job that it does that history bound to evidence can't, and that that job is valuable. I think counterfactuals roughly accomplish the same end. If you're willing to try them with imagination, they're good for teaching you, again, why you actually like the safety net of evidence, why evidence is important, but maybe occasionally, why some of the things that you'd like to do have to happen some other way.
	I can tell you in my own field, coming back to the Rodney, this is the place where a lot of postcolonial theory got stuck, is that a lot of people wanted to be able to imagine what the non-Western societies of the world would have been like in their forward trajectory had it not been for the expansion of the West. The point is, people stop dead, especially historians, at that, because they want to stay with the safety net of evidence. It's a valid question, and more importantly, it's a valid desire. To satisfy the desire, you're going to have to use imagination, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
	The second thing is, historians, when you accuse ... Niall Ferguson in his piece says, "Most historians are left-wing, and they're determinists," and most historians, if you say, if you give them that little piece, say, you know, basically, "Screw you!" They would say that to Niall Ferguson anyway for all sorts of reasons. They don't like that because they don't think of themselves that way. Most of us think we really respect what folks would call contingency, the possibility that things could have been different than they are, that we really believe in that. We believe that our analysis demonstrates that.
	But it's hard to not be, to make clear that you're not a determinist if you don't occasionally explore the what would have happened, explicitly. No wonder people take you as a determinist if you always freak out every time somebody says, "Well, what would have happened?" You have to, if you're going to convince people that you believe in contingency, you have to sometimes flesh out the would-have-happens, the if-onlys.
	Then finally, I think one of the reasons people don't like counterfactuals that I don't think anyone talks about very much, historians don't like them, but even actually frankly people that write fiction for a living, is that it is almost impossible to write narrative descriptions of some counterfactuals that we all intuitively sense must be important. What I mean by that is that if you're talking about global scales, you're talking about large-scale phenomena, you can't really write a story that's, "and then this happened, and then that happened, and that could have happened differently." That's why in a way everybody sticks to military history: just because you can write it. You can narrate it. You can say, "And then the cannon didn't fire," or, "And then Nelson didn't die, and then there wasn't a statue in Trafalgar Square." You can do that.
	If I say, on the other hand, "Well, what if, uh, the Portuguese had sailed at a slightly different date down the West African coast, and what if Malinke-speaking peoples, um, had not been present on the coast at that time with their particular practices of trade and engagement, and what if the Portuguese, um, had come in slightly smaller numbers, and what if, um, some of the coastal peoples in West Africa had been slightly more socially organized in a plausible way." I'm trying to talk about too many things that are simultaneous to one another, and they're all small, and they're all interacting, and they're not a good, "and then, and then, and then." They're not "for want of a nail."
	But it might be that those things are still worth thinking about, just not as narrative history. It might be, for example, that that's the kind of thing you can only work with and show to people with some sort of simulation, with something that is basically digital in character, that's more like the kinds of simulations and models that the other social sciences frequently use, especially economics. So there may be other ways to do certain types of counterfactuals that are good for historians that don't involve narrative history that we've never been able to do before because the technology wasn't there. I think that's a sort of interesting thought that goes beyond the terms of why historians get uncomfortable.
	All right? Questions, thoughts.