What If?: The World’s Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Have you heard the one about Winston Churchill and the New York taxicab driver? Could wild west sharp-shooter Annie Oakley have prevented World War One? And might the refined culture of Ancient Greece have been stopped before it started by… one man’s failure to get a good night’s sleep?
At a time like now, when history seems at a turning point, it’s fascinating to look back on so many other moments when a tiny change in events – weather, ship maintenance, one narrowly-avoided death… – might have changed the course of our past, and with it our present.
“What if..?” assembles the expertise of 20 military historians to ponder such turning points. Each essay sets the scene – culture, people, events – in detail before zooming-in on the point of change where things might have happened differently. These alternative chains of events then unfold with realistic logic and we get to see the result – sometimes a completely unexpected transformation, and a few times very little, or very subtle, change.
The turning-point that punched me in the guts had to be the one that spared Western Europe from the Golden Horde. I came to appreciate what had been lost: enlightened city-states in what is now Russia; irrigation systems that enabled the arid Middle East to support millions (also in enlightened city-states). The technology, and the entire population who might have remembered how to rebuild, were simply wiped off the map. We still don’t have the knowledge to rebuild! It could be said that Russia and the Middle East are living with the consequences to this day. Russia were having to ‘pay gifts’ to the Mongols’ descendents until Peter the Great finally put a stop to it – in 1700, after some 450 years of damage. “When I recall the beauty of our history before the accursed Mongols I want to drop on the ground and roll around in despair,” wrote Ivan Bunin.
Even now, the Chinese unit of paper money bears the name of the Mongol ‘dynasty’ there – Yuan.
So after all that, why only 4 stars and not 5?
It’s personal to me, as a Yorkshirewoman. I’d love to have had a chapter included on what would have happened here had William failed at Hastings. Our region would not have been massacred (three quarters of our population perished) nor its seat of government destroyed. Feudalism as we knew it would never have established here and, most bizarrely, England might have remained ‘Orthodox’ – answering to Constantinople and not Rome.
But we are all accidents of history, so 4 stars it is.
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