One approaches this volume with great expectations, as the editor's other works have been popular and readable. The topic itself is somewhat problematic, as it could lead into a sort of dead end, akin to asking for the purpose of life (life is to be lived; history is that which has already happened, thus a fait accompli, and not all your king's horses and all your king's men can do a thing about it). However, such an approach could hypothetically serve as a guide to current actions on the nationaland internationaal stage, if there were an effort to tease out where things went wrong, and what could have been done differently. Some of the contributions in this volume do serve this purpose, but on the whole I am not impressed; many of the chapters have limited interest to a general audoence (I confess that I gave up two-thirds into an interminable and dreary account of Ireland's problems; and I am a guy who usually persists doggedly to the bitter end out of respect to the writer). Ironically, the editor's own contribution at the end works the least well of all the chapters, degenerating as it does into a fantasy of Hitler occupying Britain, and does not really serve the purposes of improving our understanding of how history happens. ( )

The 'what ifs' of history are fascinating to both historians and casual history buffs alike, and even academics as straight-laced as Niall Ferguson, the editor of Virtual History, and his co-contributors cannot resist the speculation. Though lacking the vim and populism of Robert Cowley's later trilogy of What If? books, the historians in this collection manage to explore, convincingly, an England without a Civil War, an America without a Revolution, a British Ireland, a First World War without British intervention, a Nazi-occupied Britain and Europe, an even colder Cold War, a demythologised JFK completing a full presidential term, and a USSR enduring its crisis of the early Nineties.

Despite refuting E. H. Carr's famous dismissal of 'what ifs' as 'parlour games', Ferguson et al. are not here to loosen their ties and kick off their shoes, conjuring up images of swastikas over Whitehall or Union Jacks over the White House. Following the principle identified by Hugh Trevor-Roper that "history is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened" (pg. 95), theirs is a serious pitch for the validity of 'what ifs' as a useful historical diagnostic tool.

There are both benefits and drawbacks to such a staid thesis. The benefits are almost entirely on the academic side: the book convinces us of this tool's usefulness both in deepening our understanding of the historical record (following Trevor-Roper's maxim) and in providing a "necessary antidote to determinism" (pg. 89). The latter is a significant part of the appeal of 'what ifs', rooting out the complacency in historical narratives that, say, an American sense of liberty meant the United States was inevitable, or that Allied righteousness and democracy meant victory in the Second World War was foreordained. In a delicious (if over-long) afterword, Ferguson knits each of the historical 'what ifs' discussed in the book into one long counterfactual history, in which an Anglo-American Empire (absent an eventful 1776) faces off against a German continental hegemon. Ferguson's delivery of the narrative is uncanny, and you can readily imagine a world in which events proceeded in this way. When Ferguson's afterword, without breaking character, concludes that following "the two decades after Kennedy's fall from grace, it is tempting to see the subsequent break-up of the Anglo-American Empire as inevitable" (pg. 439), it is easy to see his point, aping as he does our conventional historical lines about the inevitability of the USSR's collapse. Consider our progressive narratives duly shaken, our Western achievements and reprieves duly qualified.

However, Virtual History is rarely as bracing as its topics – Nazi Britain, Royal Americans, etc. – might suggest. The more casual reader will find this book hard work. It too often gets bogged down in the historiography, with each chapter taking its sweet time to get to the point, sucking the life out of many of the arguments. Ferguson and his co-contributors tend towards economic history, which is dry even at the best of times, but even so you would wish for a less dispassionate (perhaps even joyless) definition of the titular 'virtual history' than the following: "the counterfactual scenarios… are not mere fantasy: they are simulations based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world" (pg. 85). Academics might appreciate this precision, and will be able to lean heavily on the book in the debate around counterfactual history, but the more casual reader of Virtual History will find that same weight presses unbearably upon them. ( )

Como novela de entretenimiento puede pasar. Luego están las opiniones de los diferentes «historiadores» según las apreciaciones de cada uno. Evidentemente, todos son parciales y cuentan sólo la parte que a ellos les va en el cuento, despreciando y no teniendo en cuenta lo que les conviene desechar. Que es precisamente lo que rigió en la mayoría de las ocasiones escogidas. Yo no soy muy amigo de la historia-ficción, a no ser que sea también en contextos de ciencia-ficción, con universos paralelos. Porque el objetivo de este tipo de especulaciones suele ser lamentar lo «bien» que habrían ido las cosas si no hubieran ido como fueron, lo cual a menudo se hace con objetivos más ideológicos que verdaderamente honestos para con el curso de los acontecimientos. ( )

I think the premise of this book was more interesting than the actual outcome. Although I enjoyed the introduction that went into the ideas about history and historical progress, I also felt that it dragged on a bit when I just wanted to get into the scenarios. But once I did, it was only the first three chapters that I actually enjoyed reading—the ones about the inevitability of English civil war, US independence and the chances of Irish Home Rule earlier than it happened, respectively—the later ones, for some reason or another, failed to interest me in the end. Taking less time to read this book might have helped, but I think my longest breaks were between chapters rather than within them. ( )

No me gustó para nada. me pareció muy tirado de los pelos algunas conclusiones que pecan inclusive de algunos de los vicios que señala en el capitulo primero ( )