What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Robert Cowley, editor

"What If?", edited by Robert Cowley, is a 1999 book exploring counter-factual military scenarios of the past twenty centuries and more that could have dramatically altered the present circumstances for mankind. Each chapter is written by a historian--such as John Keegan, Stephen Ambrose, David McCollough, Victor David Hanson, et al--who has expertise in the period he writes about.
Starting with the mysterious plague that wiped out the Assyrian army during the siege of Jerusalem in 701, BC, the reader sees that circumstances we take for granted in the culture of monotheism that dominates the spiritual life of the West and Near Eastern World would have been very different had the remaining two tribes of the Judean Kingdom been carried off to assimilate into a larger empire. What would organized religion have come from the vacuum created by the loss of the Jewish foundation? In other words, if there had not been a plague at the walls 2,700 years ago, would there have been a Jesus Christ or a Mohammad? (It raises a deeper question of the notion of divine intervention in human affairs, of course, but historians have to deal with the surface records
and not those of faith and metaphysics.)

Further, if the united Greek navy under the Athenian Admiral Themistocles hadn't been able to pull off a feint that fooled the massive Persian navy two centuries later at Salamis in 480 BC, it is very unlikely that the Athenian Empire would have sprouted up and gave the modern minds of the Enlightenment a blueprint for the ideals of a voting franchise for ordinary citizens--at least ordinary male citizens of one powerful city-state.

The "what ifs" presented in the book do not always give one the sense that history work out for the best. Consider Lewis Lapham's chapter, "Furor Teutonicus", recounting the after effects of a horrific massacre of three entire Roman Legions under General Quinctilius Varus somewhere in the Teutoborg Forest in 9 AD. ( A defeat so terrible it ended the ambitions of Caesar Augustus north of the Danube, forced his successor Tiberius to be satisfied with vengeful, punitive and incomplete military campaigns across the empire's northern frontier.)

Had the Romans succeeded in subduing the Germanic tribes 2,000 years ago then its empire would have extended beyond the Danube into the heart of Germany. A Latinized Germany, Lapham believes, might have set Middle Europe on a course that would 1,900 years beyond have spared the Western World the ravages of the First and Second World War.

The book recounts various other major historical "long-shots"--Charles Martel's Frankish army's defeat of a Islamic force in Poitiers, France in 723 AD to the unlikely halt of the Mongol Empire from destroying the independence of the European Kingdoms in the 1200's--thanks to the death of Genghis Khan's son in 1242; Hernando Cortes' Conquest of the Aztec Empire, and the improbable destruction of the Spanish fleet by English fire ships and bad English Channel storms in 1588. Each of these distant events produced the cultural and lingual standards that remain in place today. In some cases these circumstances could have been very different, so the book argues, if one general had been more aggressive or if the the weather was better or worse during a military campaign.

The book goes on into the American Revolution--where Thomas Fleming presents 13 plausible moments in that bloody trial where George Washington and his rebel generals would have needed to surrender--the most haunting being a moment when a British sharpshooter had the Father of the Country dead to rights in his cross-hairs--and didn't pull the trigger. It goes through more familiar terrain for amateur "what if?" speculators (Napoleon wins at Waterloo; Lee defeats General Meade's Union Army at Gettysburg; the failure of D-Day allows the Red Army time to sweep into more of Europe, perhaps all the way to the English Channel by late 1945 and creating a de facto Communist Europe.) Stalin in Calais? What a mess that would have been!

It's all quite interesting and I admit I can't wait to get into the second volume.