Unmaking the West : "what-if?" scenarios that rewrite world history
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. -- Publisher website
Print Book, English, ©2006
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, ©2006
Imaginary histories
x, 415 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm
9780472115433, 9780472031436, 047211543X, 0472031430
65425784
Unmaking the Middle Kingdom / the editors
Counterfactual thought experiments / Philip E. Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker
A stillborn west? / Victor Davis Hanson
The resilient West / Barry S. Strauss
The quest for a counterfactual Jesus / Carlos M.N. Eire
Religious kitsch or industrial revolution / Carlos M.N. Eire
Europe's peculiar path / Jack A. Goldstone
Nineteenth-century British imperialism undone with a single shell fragment / Carla Gardina Pestana
The Song empire / Robin D.S. Yates
Without coal? colonies? calculus? / Kenneth Pomeranz
King Kong and cold fusion / Joel Mokyr
Hitler wins in the East but Germany still loses World War II / Holger H. Herwig
Counterfactual history / Geoffrey Parker and Philip E. Tetlock