Must-Read: Dietz Vollrath: Can You Do Historical Counter-Factuals?

Should-Read: Do historians do counter-factuals? Yes. Can you do historical counter-factuals? Yes. Could you do without historical counter-factuals? No. A world in which historians do not engage in and with counterfactuals would e a world in which human actions have no meaning, because you would never be able to say “this mattered”–you would only be able to say “this happened, and then that happened, and that is what was”. And why would anyone with any volition at all wish to create or live in such a world?

Dietz Vollrath: Can You Do Historical Counter-Factuals?: “Studying slavery and capitalism, for example, we do not have thousands of different societies or cultures to page through…

…to find one that looks almost exactly like the Anglo-American industrializing societies, but doesn’t have slavery. We cannot compare like to like, and do the plausible counter-factual… somehow “switch[ing] off” slavery…. The experience and implications of slavery are entwined with every other aspect of the industrializing societies, and pulling it out would entail massive shocks to all these other aspects. “Doing the counterfactual” looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is what Foner is objecting to because it sounds like writing some sort of alternative history novel. And it would be pure speculation to write such a novel….

[But] we don’t have to think about writing down an alternative history novel. We need to think about lots and lots of possible novels in which slavery did not exist, and lots and lots in which it did. And based on those thousands of alternative history novels, is it true that when slavery remains present into the 1800’s, that capitalism develops? And is it true that when slavery fails to persist (or maybe never really exists?) that capitalism fails to develop?… We could ask if – statistically speaking – alternative histories without slavery tended to be without capitalism, and alternative histories with slavery tended to have capitalism. When economists are talking about historical counterfactuals, I think this is what they have in mind. At least, it is what I have in mind….

The claim that slavery was not necessary for capitalism… mean[s]… that of all the alternative histories we could have gotten, the ones without slavery most likely would still have gotten capitalism anyway. And the proposed explanations for that – Indian and Egyptian supply responses, alternative labor arrangements in the US South – are arguments about the probability of capitalism occurring in those thousands of alternative histories.

I see why this can be frustrating…. How could you possibly conceive of thousands of different alternative histories, when we as yet know so little about this one?… Despite this, one advantage of thinking explicitly about this in terms of many-alternative-histories is that you can avoid falling into arguments about mono-causality. If you say that slavery is necessary for capitalism, and then say that in a counterfactual history without slavery capitalism would not have existed, you a careening perilously close to saying that slavery was the single cause of capitalism. You might try to swerve to avoid this by saying that speculating about that counterfactuals is silly in the first place….

I cannot get my head around asking “why”, as Foner does, without being able to undertake any kind of counter-factual exercise, whether in the data or in my head. But perhaps the concept of thinking in terms of many-alternative-histories, rather than feeling you must commit to a single one, is a way of making the idea of counterfactuals more palatable…