From the Archives: F. J. C. Hearnshaw's "The 'Ifs' of History" (1929)

One of the pleasures of research is coming across unknown texts.  I recently stumbled upon an interwar book that I was unaware of:  F. J. C. Hearnshaw's The "Ifs" of History (1929).  I found an original (and pretty cheap) copy online, so I ordered it and received it the other day.

It is one of earliest anthologies of counterfactual essays in the 20th century, after Joseph Chamberlin's identically named volume, The Ifs of History from 1907, but before J. C. Squire's more famous edited volume,  If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931).

I haven't yet read the individual essays (all of which are pretty short), but they span topics from "If Joan of Arc Had Stayed at Home" to "If Napoleon Had Not Gone to Moscow."

I've read the brief introduction, though, and it's interesting to note that Hearnshaw rejects the claim by Thomas Carlyle (without mentioning him) that 'nothing is more futile...than speculation concerning what might have been."  

Hearnshaw, in fact, goes on to say that "it is profitable not only to ask how things actually happened, but also to ask what would, or might, have been the trend of affairs if some fundamental factor had been different."

Hearnshaw (1869-1946), it turns out, was an academic historian in Britain. He was conservatively inclined politically, but by virtue of his edited volume, it is clear that he was willing to be something of a trailblazer methodologically. 

It remains to be seen how many other professional historians were similarly inclined in this period.