I recently bought a magazine with a picture of John F Kennedy on it. He was artificially aged to his mid- 60s with the words ‘What if...’ writ large above him. It was a striking image. I liked the premise and almost ran with it to the check-out. I had chanced upon What if... Book of Alternative History, which asks historians to imagine plausible alternative timelines in which major events are altered at a single ‘fork in the road.’ It makes for an interesting series of thought experiments.
The outcomes vary enormously depending on what is changed. In one of the more extreme alternative histories from a modern perspective, the experts assert that the ‘slave states’ winning the US Civil War would not only have led to the continuation of slavery in North America for much longer, but also have acted as a bellwhether for other countries. It would have shown European powers, their colonies and other nations that slavery was a viable ‘model’ on which to build an economy, perhaps as far into the future as 1950 or even 2000. Abraham Lincoln would have been the President that lost the south and, with it, his standing in history.
Other scenarios may have led to very different versions of the 20th Century. One of the most dramatic is a timeline in which communism fails to gain traction in Russia in 1917. Without communism, the experts forecast that Russia (and what became the USSR) would have developed more rapidly and much more in line with other European powers of the day. There would have been no Cold War, no communism in China and no Cuban Missile Crisis. This scenario is also likely to have avoided the Second World War, because Stalin discouraged German communists from working with the social democrats in the 1933 elections. With the vote on the left split, the door was open for Adolf Hitler to take charge.
These are perhaps the two largest ‘forks’ in What if... in terms of how different their worlds would be compared to ours. However, some seemingly major changes might have had less effect than you might think. For example, the historians claim that, had the Luftwaffe gained air superiority in the Battle of Britain in the Second World War, any invading forces that made it to the UK mainland would have been cut off by the Royal Navy and would have run out of supplies. Similarly, Germany winning the First World War is seen by the experts to have a similarly destabilising effect on Europe as the punishment it suffered after losing. The result would still have been a large and influential Germany that threw its weight around Europe, albeit ‘not quite as badly as Hitler’s Germany.’
More remarkably, even if Chinese explorers had discovered North America first, the overall arc of history is unlikely to have been altered significantly. This is because China had limited need for new land and it was far harder to traverse the Pacific than the Atlantic. A trading relationship with Native Americans may have been established, but Christopher Columbus would still arrive ‘on schedule.’ The rest is history.
Elsewhere in What if... we realise that simply having a son with Catherine of Aragon would probably have prevented Henry VIII of England from having six wives - and prevented him from starting the English Reformation in the process. Napoleon winning at Waterloo in 1815 would only have been a temporary victory before the weight of Europe’s armies eventually came crashing down on him. The USSR reaching the Moon first may have led NASA to launch missions to Mars in the 1970s.
As for President Kennedy, the experts think that, had he survived in November 1963, he would have played a similar hand to Lyndon Johnson up to the start of 1965 in order to secure re-election in 1964. However, he would then have branched off, avoiding the Vietnam war using experience gained from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A thawing of Cold War tensions may have resulted. A sufferer of various medical complaints, he is likely to have lived to see Apollo 11 (or the Soviets!) land on the moon before that decade was out, but failing health and the various scandals that came out after his death would have dogged him in later life.
Alternative history has always sparked interest. Indeed, at the back of What if... are reviews of some of the most popular alternative history books, including a work from 1490. Let’s just hope that, when future alternative histories are written, the real world has trended towards the most positive outcomes, rather than the worst case scenarios!
