Despite our blog title, we don’t really do “what if?” history, what Allan Megill called “exuberant” counterfactuals. But I’m going to have a go, mostly as a reaction to just having re-read the historian Edward Carr’s stultifying “What is History?”
Edward Carr was a renowned 20thC historian – and, I think a western consensus view now would be, wrong on every major issue. He was an appeaser of Nazi Germany in the ’30s, an admirer of the Soviet Union in the ’50s, and an apologist for Mao’s China. In his late work on historiography, What is History? (Ch.4, “Causation in History”), he argued against all contingency in history. For him, the answer to “Could it have happened otherwise?” appears always to have been “No”: “the historian writes of … the American War of Independence as if what happened was in fact bound to happen” (what, every historian? If they don’t, are they not a historian?). More subtly, and I think entirely unconsciously, his methodology places him in very similar danger to that of the “parlour games” of counterfactual history. He has the historian distinguishing relevant from irrelevant causal sequences and choosing these according to “his [sic] ability to fit them into his pattern”, in a blatant hindsight fallacy of bias confirmation.
So let’s play with causation and the American Revolution in a bid to get a rise from our American readers. I’ll start this with the words of the fictional anti-hero Harry Flashman in historical novelist George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (p104-105), set just before the US Civil War in the events around the Harper’s Ferry raid:
what astonishes me today is that all the wiseacres who discuss its origins and inevitability never give a thought to where it really began, back in 1776, with their idiotic Declaration of Independence. If they’d had the wit to stay in the Empire then, instead of getting drunk on humbug about ‘freedom’, … there would never have been an American Civil War, and that’s as sure as any ‘if’ can be. How so? Well, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery in 1833, and the south would have been bound to go along with that, grumbling, to be sure, but helpless against the will of Britain and her northern American colonies. It would all have happened quietly, no doubt with compensation, and there’d have been nothing for North and South to fight about. Q.E.D.
It seems that only Joel Swagman has responded to this quotation directly, and he makes a simple point about causation which immediately goes beyond Carr: that Britain and the USA abolished the slave trade at roughly the same time, and that Britain’s final abolition of the state of slavery was possible only with the slavery-dependent South outside the British Empire. Now, one could argue that the economic relationship of the South with Britain’s textiles industry was largely independent of the South’s political status. But the argument would have to be made; there is no simple one-way chain of causation to appeal to.
Going back to whether US independence itself could have been averted or delayed, it’s noticeable that many counterfactuals concentrate on the war itself and whether Britain could have won. It would be natural for us, whose main activity is counterfactual military history, to focus on this too. But I don’t think that’s where the moment of greatest contingency is to be found.
Recall that in 1763 Britain won the Seven Years’ War and gained most of French North America, but at enormous financial cost – and from the Tea Party to “no taxation without representation” the one causal certainty about US independence is that it was precipitated by what was perceived to be harsh taxation. So the obvious counterfactual to avert the War of Independence is for a wiser post-1764 British government to accommodate and placate the US colonies with some measure of self-governance, something much stronger than the actual Conciliatory Resolution, and to re-balance the funding of the Seven Years’ War.
Is this plausible? The funding question is one for economic historians. But concerning the politics there’s a striking piece of serendipity in one of the great books of 20thC history, Lewis Namier’s The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which studied the fine detail of British politics in the 1760s to show that it was much more contingent and personality-driven, and less a settled two-party system, than had been thought. (It is striking that the 1760s saw six British Prime Ministers, one more than the last decade, another period of change and contingency.) Namier went out of fashion for a while, but it seems to me that he firmly established the 1760s as what political scientists call a “critical juncture”, a period of great contingency after which anything – or at least a wider range of future outcomes than normal – is possible.
Of course you might object, and say that under the Whig oligarchy (even allowing for George III’s support of the Tories, and in the light of Namier) nothing could have bound America to Britain. Then one perhaps needs a Stuart monarchy victorious after the ’45 – but a central fact of the ’45 was the rebels’ failure to attract supporters to their cause in the march south that finished at Derby. For us that makes a lasting Stuart victory implausible – although it might well have been enough to avert or delay the Seven Years’ War and thereby the War of Independence.
I don’t want to pursue these lines of argument here; they would need some serious historical work. Rather I want merely to note that putting forward a simple but contentious counterfactual can be a useful prompt to organize one’s broader thinking about chains of causation in history, and thence about which among the various counterfactual antecedents is the most plausible – where the critical junctures are to be found, the periods of greatest sensitivity of the outcomes of interest to the uncertainties of that period.
Of course you might say “why bother to do so? – it’s no business of the historian”. But historical methodology can always be expanded, and academic political science is certainly interested in such matters. History (in our view) should be looking to assimilate newly-available techniques, and the study of causal inference is becoming increasingly well established in statistics and the social sciences. I don’t know of any analysis of a causal web which combines history, political science and quantitative causal techniques, but it would be interesting to see if such a study might be feasible. From a scientist’s perspective, with our experience of transdisciplinary teams, there’s plenty of scope for such projects in history.
Finally, though such ideas take us into rather high-flown history, notice that a crucial idea above, Namier’s establishment of the 1760s as a critical juncture, was above all a work of detail. Just as science needs (in Rutherford’s dictum) physicists and stamp-collectors – systematizers and classifiers, theorists and experimentalists – so history requires both the bird’s-eye theorist and synthesizer and the detail-obsessed explorer of archive material. Projects such as that suggested above will only be possible thanks to the work of serious historians in establishing the extent of contingency at particular places and times.
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Notes and “What ifs?”:
Thomas Fleming, Unlikely Victory, and David McCullough, What the Fog Wrought, both in Robert Cowley’s collection What If?, are both CFs within, but assuming, the War of Independence. Tom Wicker, If Lincoln had not freed the slaves, in Cowley, More What If?, has the Civil War reaching a less clear conclusion.
Winston Spencer Churchill, If Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg, in Squire, If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), is written from the counterfactual perspective of a world in which Lee did win, the south won the Civil War, the US was closely Allied with the UK, averted WW1, ….
Andrew Roberts, What if George III hadn’t ‘lost’ the colonies?
Uri Friedman, What if America had lost the Revolutionary War? – then there’d have been no French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, WW1 or WW2 (apparently). Even more exuberant.
Esmond Wright, Benjamin Franklin in the early 1770s, in Snowman, If I Had Been… Ten Historical Fantasies, has Franklin averting revolution, but dosn’t really explore consequences.
This New York school teaching resource Was the American Revolution avoidable? does what it says on the tin.
Weighing the Fog of War 