Historical counterfactuals– what would have happened to the world if X didn’t occur, or Y went differently?-- get a bad rap. They are often used by the worst people to make the worst kind of arguments– the occasion for this particular post is a British newspaper arguing (obviously erroneously) that the slave trade was good for African economic development. If I recall, Niall Ferguson, a historian who infamously argued the US should take after the example of the British Empire and occupy Iraq for centuries, has dabbled in counterfactual reasoning too. 

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There are lower stakes reasons for discontent with counterfactuals too: the public most frequently encounters them in alternate history. This can be a fun and enjoyable genre of fiction, but it is fiction. It also has a sometimes-unsavory tendency to imagine and popularize certain kinds of counterfactuals and not others– I can name offhand a number of TV shows that imagine a Nazi victory in WWII, but nobody’s out here developing a TV series where the revolutions of 1848 succeeded, or colonialism didn’t happen. 

Nevertheless, I think a degree of counterfactual reasoning is not only valid but a necessary part of historical reasoning.  

I often tell my students that there are two forms of historical significance (I don’t think this is a particular novel formulation, it’s just mine): indicative significance and causal significance. Indicative significance means an event or person or development is important because of what it reveals to us now. The fact that Tobias Smollett’s picaresque novels were wildly popular in the 18th century tells us a great deal about who the literate public was and what they cared about; the same goes for Star Wars and the moviegoing public in the late 20th century. Even if nobody who ever read The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker or watched Empire Strikes Back did anything different from what they would otherwise have done in their lives, the fact that millions of them were interested in this story over others tells us something about them. For example, you might argue (and I’m sure someone has better than I am here) Star Wars’s vision of a used and beat-up future rather than the gleaming cosmic tomorrow of the immediate postwar era was particularly popular in the inflationary and deindustrializing 80s.

Causal significance is when something matters historically because it caused other things. Media can have this too– there are particular tropes in science fiction that have inarguably played a clear and quite unfortunate causal role in how the rationalist movement approaches AI– but it’s generally harder to prove. More typically a causal argument might relate to economics or politics. The crux of Control Science was not merely an observation that economic thought has co-developed with labor control for centuries, but a series of arguments that because of this, economic thought looks a particular way. 

Arguments based on causal significance are more difficult for a historian to make than mere observations of events or indicative analyses of them. But I think these are some of the most important claims that we make. While indicative significance matters and I have profound respect for work focused primarily on that, it is not the only work there is. A history without causes (and I think fundamentally no one is actually trying to do that) would be a discipline that produces no understanding of events at all. 

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And here’s the thing: all causal claims necessarily imply a counterfactual. X caused Y implies that without X, Y would at least have needed another cause and probably would have looked different. Any time anyone makes an argument about causes they are making an argument about not-causes. Arguments that slavery’s abolition relied on the Christian ethics of particular British elites, changes in sugar economics, and/or new forms of mass politics are all also arguments that without these developments, slavery would have persisted or been abolished in a different way and with different results. 

This doesn’t mean actually constructing a complete counterfactual. I don’t know what economic thought would have looked like had it not co-developed with labor control. But you can try to imagine, and again, any clearly-formed argument about what has happened begins to conjure a partial vision of what did not. When you argue about thing X you could, if you wanted, venture out on a limb and make an explicit argument about what the world would have looked like if not X. As long as you do this cautiously– which mostly means acknowledging that it’s conjecture with a lesser truth value than claims about what did happen– it’s entirely valid and flows logically from the same premises as arguments about the actual past do.