Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History

by Philip E. Tetlock (Editor), Richard Ned Lebow (Editor)

What if the Persians had won at Salamis? What if Christ had not been crucified? What if the Chinese had harnessed steam power before the West? Disparaged by some as a mere parlor game, counterfactual history is seen by others as an indispensable historical tool. Taking as their point of inquiry the debate over the inevitability of the rise of the West, the eminent scholars in Unmaking the West argue that there is no escaping counterfactual history. Whenever we make claims of cause and effect, we commit ourselves to the assumption that if key links in the causal chain were broken, history would have unfolded otherwise. Likewise, without counterfactual history we all too easily slip into the habit of hindsight bias, forgetting, as soon as we learn what happened, how unpredictable the world looked beforehand, and closing our minds to all the ways the course might have changed. This collection is thus both an exploration of alternative scenarios to world history and an exercise in testing the strengths and weaknesses of counterfactual experiments.

"If ever there was an argument for the usefulness of counterfactual history, this admirable, and admirably focused, collection has convincingly made it."
—Robert Cowley, editor of the What If?TM series

"With chapters ranging from politics to war to religion to economics and to science and technology, this is the most thematically wide-ranging collection on counterfactuality. An intelligent, cutting-edge study with important things to say."
—Jonathan C. D. Clark, Department of History, University of Kansas
"This volume is likely to become a standard reference in the literature on historical methodology, and could have a dramatic impact on the way future generations of historians approach disciplinary inquiry. . . . By allowing readers to share in the doubts and epiphanies that lead up to the authors' epistemological revelations, the volume allows readers to grasp the rich potential of approaching their own research from a counterfactual perspective."
—Aaron Belkin, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Philip E. Tetlock is Mitchell Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Richard Ned Lebow is James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and author of The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders , winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology. Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State University, a Fellow of the British Academy, and author of The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 , winner of two book prizes.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Alternate History

432 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 2006

Reviews

[Daniel Rothwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun book! A really great display of the workings, effectiveness, and limits of counter-factual argumentation. The first chapter (and the epilogue a little) provide a philosophical justification for this approach. Read any of the other chapters if they interest you. The notables are: Ch.9, subtitled 'Counterfactuals & Industrialization in Europe and China' was the most interesting to me, Ch.10 'Counterfactual analysis & the history of technology' is an awfully analytic [philosophy] approach and somwhat a rebuttal to ch.9. Ch.6 and ch.7 provide good examples of the limitation of this mode of thinking - William III's early death either completely collapses the Industrial Revolution or would at best retard it by a few years in each essay respectively.

I'm not wholly convinced that counterfactual *narrative history* is not really just a sort of dialogical exercise to discover one's thoughts and biases in one's own understanding of history, but this is certainly a book that begs to be engaged with.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do not read this book if you are not prepared for a scholarly discussion as to the usefulness of "counter factual history." As with any compilation of essays, some were better written than others. I was reminded again of how scholars think (with end-notes) providing documentation for every point. The essay on the technology and the west reminded me of the technology tree in Civilization. Overall, I am glad I read the book.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

some are pretty disappointed with this one

so watch out for his superforcasting book

and how limited and oversimplified assumptions
will affect your model

and how you get flawed simulations and insights some of the time

Futurism is littered with a lot of hype
and stuff that never really seems as good under the hood than it first seems

At least one never gets enough speculation with events in history
but often the assumptions can be ridiculous and unrealistic

Sometimes it'll read good once
and you'll note all the strange simplifications

if you only did something totally different
yet totally unrealistic
from another time, and another country
you could have succeeded

Yet there is still hope for trisexual time-travelling jellyfish to create new episodes of the Rockford Files.

[Philip Chaston · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of contingencies that helped or hindered the rise of the West.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was unfortunately a great disappointment. I would have given this collection of articles one star, except that I think that the project described within the volume was a worthwhile, if failed, endeavor.

The project behind this book was to, using methodological guidelines, create an alternative history in which the East (loosely defined) became industrial leaders ahead of the West (again loosely defined), using the most minimal change possible. Then, given that this occurred, to look to find the minimum change that would again leave the West with its successes. Overall, it was a great project to induce a proper skepticism about the certainty of history, moderating political beliefs that would suggest that what happened was inevitable for cultural or material reasons.

Unfortunately, one challenge to counterfactual history is these histories is undertaken in writing by academic writers, which can be too scattered and esoteric, yet simultaneously nitpicking and pedantic. It is for this reason that I suppose that various formal measures, including support from information technology, will be necessary for representing the dependency assumptions of history and manipulating them with any coherence. This is exactly the kind of structure that allowed the statistical analysis of "Expert Political Judgment" to be so successful. Overall, the first chapter, framing the exercise, is a worthwhile read, and I hope it is extended in the way I suggest, to give such a project the kind of structure it would really need to succeed.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside from a few stellar pieces within, this book's best virtue may be the introduction's spirited case for the place of counterfactual narratives in the legitimate study of history.