If It Had Happened Otherwise

If It Had Happened Otherwise (ISBN 028397821X) is a 1931 collection of essays edited by J. C. Squire and published by Longmans, Green. Each essay in the collection could be considered alternate history or counterfactual history, a few written by leading historians of the period and one by Winston Churchill.

Essays

The original edition included the following essays:^[1]

• "If Drouet's Cart Had Stuck" by Hilaire Belloc: In a 1791 point of divergence, the Allies win the Battle of Valmy and restore Louis XVI to the French throne as a puppet of the British Empire, leading to France becoming a poor, backward nation, eventually entering World War I, which happens a few years later than in reality and ends with the victory of the still-extant Holy Roman Empire.
• "If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary Queen of Scots" by G. K. Chesterton^[2]

• "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" by Winston Churchill: This essay is written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world where the Confederacy won the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War, and the narration frequently asks what would happen if that were not so, the joke being that we know that it isn't so. Although the Confederate States of America achieves independence, the British Empire becomes a broker between the USA and CSA, resulting in an eventual unification of all three as the "English Speaking Association", which prevents World War I.^[3]

• "If Napoleon Had Escaped to America" by H. A. L. Fisher: Napoleon Bonaparte, fleeing from the Battle of Waterloo, avoids surrendering to the British Empire and catches a ship sailing to New York City. The essay is written in the character of a New York scholar who becomes a personal assistant of the former Emperor of the French. Napoleon travels south to join Simon Bolivar in liberating most of Central America and South America from Spanish and Portuguese rule.

• "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" by Philip Guedalla: Islamic Granada survives as a separate political entity, weakening Spain from the late 15th century onward, but resulting in a liberal humanist brand of Islam, the adoption of constitutional monarchy, and Spanish participation on the Central Powers' side during World War I against Granada and the Allies.

• "If the General Strike Had Succeeded" by Ronald Knox: This essay is in the form of an article from The Times of 1931, which describes a Great Britain under communist rule.

• "If the Emperor Frederick Had Not Had Cancer" by Emil Ludwig: German Emperor Frederick III survives, and with his wife, Princess Victoria, rules a liberal humanist German Empire where their son Kaiser Wilhelm II never succumbs to militarism, due to the long-term benign effects of this scenario, leading to 1914 being a year of peace.

• "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness" by André Maurois: As with Hilaire Belloc's essay above, the main story posits Louis XVI as averting his 1793 death in the French Revolution, but the point of divergence happens in the 1770s rather than 1791, and leads to more optimistic outcome. The essay begins with a frame story which has a recently deceased historian being escorted by an angel to a great library in Heaven, where he gets to read history books of possible worlds that did not come to be. His eye is caught by a book whose cover states that Louis XVI had a 46-year reign as King of France, dying of a lung illness in 1820. In the main story, the young king, shortly after coming to power in the mid 1770s, makes necessary financial and constitutional reforms beforehand that prevent the necessity for the Revolution, resulting in the survival of France as a constitutional monarchy into the twentieth century. Louis refuses to sponsor the American Revolution and later builds an alliance between Great Britain and the Kingdom of France; the United States never exists, but the lands that would have become it do get the representation they desired from the British Parliament so the expanding America effectively controls Britain. The 1790s and 1800s are relatively peaceful decades for Europe, and everyone basically lives happily ever after.

• "If Byron Had Become King of Greece" by Harold Nicolson. The fun-loving poet and playwright survives past his 1824 illness which killed him in actual history, becomes chief military strategist in Greece's war against the Ottoman Empire, and is chosen to be the new nation's first monarch in the 1830s. He is referred to in the story as George I of Greece, a name which in reality was given to a different monarch 30 years later.

• "If It Had Been Discovered in 1930 that Bacon Really Did Write Shakespeare" by J. C. Squire. This is not really an alternate history, but is rather a comic farce where cultural upheavals, acts of quick thinking in rebranding tourist attractions, and additions of new slang terms to the English language occur when someone finds a box containing 17th-century documents proving that the plays generally accepted to have been written by William Shakespeare were in fact written by Sir Francis Bacon.

• "If Booth Had Missed Lincoln" by Milton Waldman: Booth's gun fails to fire at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865 and he is put in prison as a dangerous madman. Lincoln is charged with mismanaging the recently concluded Civil War, and there is repeated friction between Lincoln and a hostile United States Congress. Before Congress can impeach him in 1867, however, Lincoln dies, discredited and castigated as a spendthrift warmonger. Lincoln's role in this story is essentially the same as that of his successor Andrew Johnson in real history.

Revised edition

A revised edition with the alternate title If: or, History Rewritten was also released by the American publisher Viking in 1931, deleting Ronald Knox's essay and adding one new essay along with reprints of two older ones:

• "If the Dutch Had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam" by Hendrik Willem van Loon

• "If: A Jacobite Fantasy" by Charles Petrie (1926): Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") wins the Battle of Culloden in 1745, resulting in George II of England's exile to his ancestral home in Hanover, Germany. James Francis Edward Stuart (son of James II of England, or the "Old Pretender") is restored to the British throne as "James III of England and VIII of Scotland", but proves conciliatory in terms of religion and government, and is a great patron of arts and entertainment. When "Bonnie Prince Charlie" succeeds his father as Charles III in 1766, his adroit diplomatic skills prevent the American Revolution through sharing his own dislike for the House of Commons with the American intelligentsia. Henry Benedict Stuart succeeds his childless brother in 1788, as "Henry IX," reigning until his death in 1807. He does not enter the Catholic clergy as in reality, but instead marries and has a son who succeeds him as king, so the Stuart dynasty remains on the throne in the 1920s when "James VI of England and XI of Scotland" reigns. ^[4]

• "If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo" by G. M. Trevelyan (1907): In this world, Great Britain becomes a reactionary dictatorship wracked with political instability in the early nineteenth century, dealing with the trauma of defeat and reparations, resulting in the censorship of much of English Romanticism. France governs much of Europe, and Napoleon eventually dies of old age.^[5]

See also

Among many other works of alternate-history science fiction:

• Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore is one of the novels of a world in which the Confederacy was successful in the American Civil War.
• The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick is story-within-a-story novel positing how the Allies may have won in a world where they did not, analogous to the alternate-alternate history of "If Robert E Lee Had NOT Won the Battle of Gettysburg".
• The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (2012) by Stephen L. Carter uses the same premise as "If Booth Had Missed Lincoln."

References