Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

Leading historians explore what might have been if nine of the most decisive moments in modern history had never happened.

“A welcome, optimistic assault on an intellectual heresy that has done much, much more harm than good.” – Sunday Times  (UK)

What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Ireland had never been divided? What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Hitler had invaded Britain or had defeated the Soviet Union? What if Russians had won the Cold War? What if Kennedy had lived? What if there had been no Gorbachev?

This book is a delightful but historically rigorous series of separate voyages into “imaginary time” and provides intriguing, far-reaching answers to these questions.  Virtual History  features contributions from talented, imaginative, and well-regarded historians, led by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s ninety-page introduction is a brilliant manifesto-like defense of the methodology of counterfactual history and offers a convincing justification of the whole enterprise. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from the maintenance of Stuart rule in England. This breathtaking narrative paints a picture of our world that is convincingly skewed: from the accession of “James III” in 1701 and a Nazi-occupied England, to U.S. Prime Minister Kennedy who lives to complete his term and the “Sultan of Baghdad” Saddam Hussein.