Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Germany had won the Second? What if the Soviet Union had won the Third? Far from being the result of determinist laws, what actually happened in the past was only one of a number of plausible outcomes. Indeed, to contemporaries, it may not even have been the most likely. To understand what did happen, we therefore need to understand what might have happened. Beginning in the seventeenth century with the English Civil War and ending with the collapse of Communism in the 1990s Virtual History explores what would have happened if nine momentous events had turned out differently. The answers it provides are not fiction because each solution is strictly based on the alternatives which we know contemporaries contemplated. The result not only illuminates the actual course of events but also gives us a compelling glimpse of the 'parallel worlds' which could have been: An absolutist, Catholic England. An America opting for British rule instead of independence. A united but British Ireland. A Europe economically dominated by Germany as early as 1915. An England occupied by the Nazis. A world without the Cold War. An ageing Kennedy, bogged down in Vietnam. And a triumphant Soviet Union, gloating at the collapse of capitalism after 1989.

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