Counterfactual history

Counterfactual history examines how the past might have unfolded under conditions different from those that actually occurred. It uses imagined alternatives to investigate causation, contingency, and historical interpretation.

Counterfactual thinking: Reasoning about how outcomes would differ if an event or condition had been otherwise. The general reasoning process counterfactual history applies to past events.
Alternative history: Fiction that imagines a world in which a historical event occurred differently. It shares altered pasts with counterfactual history but prioritizes narrative invention.
Historical determinism: The view that historical events follow necessarily from prior conditions or laws. Determinism challenges the premise that meaningful alternatives were available.
What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been: A 1999 collection of essays in which military historians examine alternative outcomes to major events. Its essays helped bring scholarly military counterfactuals to a broad audience.
Historical causation: The study of how and why events, conditions, and actions produce historical outcomes. Counterfactual reasoning depends on a defensible account of what caused the actual outcome.
Causal inference: Methods for determining whether and how one factor causes changes in another. Historical alternatives test which conditions plausibly made a difference to an outcome.
Military history: The study of wars, armed forces, strategy, and their historical settings. Battle scenarios ask whether different decisions or conditions could have changed a campaign.
Historicism: An approach that interprets ideas and institutions in their specific historical contexts. Its emphasis on context warns against importing later assumptions into imagined pasts.
Virtual History: A 1997 collection edited by Niall Ferguson on counterfactual reasoning in history. Ferguson's introduction argues for using counterfactuals to assess historical causation.
Causal modeling: The construction of formal representations of causal relationships among variables. Formal models expose assumptions that narrative counterfactuals can leave implicit.

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