Historians are trained to distrust the counterfactual. To ask what would have followed had the assassination failed, or the fleet sailed a week later, is thought to be a diversion from the discipline’s proper business, which is the reconstruction of what occurred. The suspicion is understandable and it is, on examination, incoherent, since every causal claim a historian makes is a counterfactual claim wearing formal dress. To say that a policy caused a famine is to say that without the policy the famine would not have occurred, or would have been smaller; there is no other content to the assertion. Historians do not avoid counterfactuals. They avoid stating them. The avoidance is not costless. A counterfactual left implicit is a counterfactual that cannot be criticised. When it is written out — had the grain levy not been imposed, mortality would have fallen by some specified degree — its assumptions become visible and its plausibility can be contested by anyone with relevant knowledge. Kept implicit, the same claim travels through a narrative as an atmosphere, doing all the argumentative work of a causal thesis while remaining formally unavailable for attack. The discipline’s methodological caution here produces the opposite of rigour. This does not license the exercise in its popular form, in which some junction is selected and an alternative century is elaborated from it. That genre fails for a reason that its practitioners rarely examine: it requires holding every other feature of the world fixed while altering one, and the fixing is arbitrary. If the battle had gone the other way, the conditions that made it close in the first place would still have obtained, and they would have continued to operate. The disciplined counterfactual is therefore extremely modest in scope. It asks what would have differed within a short interval and a narrow domain, and it declines to follow the consequences beyond the point at which they become fiction. Where the technique is genuinely used, it produces results uncomfortable for both temperaments the discipline attracts. Against those who see history as structural and impersonal, it sometimes shows that a decision by one person was load-bearing. Against those who write history as the biography of decisive individuals, it shows more often that the removal of the great man leaves the outcome largely unchanged, because a system under pressure will produce a functionally similar actor. Neither result is available to a method that refuses the question, which is one reason the refusal persists. The underlying issue is what a historical explanation is for. If it is for the reconstruction of the past as it was experienced, counterfactuals are indeed an intrusion, since no one lived through an alternative. If it is to establish what made a difference to what, then the counterfactual is not an ornament upon the method but the whole of it, and the reconstruction is merely the evidence. The discipline has never settled which of these it is doing, and its methodological quarrels are mostly this unsettled question appearing in local costume.
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