Historian Tristram Hunt comments on what if history in the Guardian:
EH Carr dismissed such whimsical exercises as a red herring worthy not of scholarly pursuit but an idle "parlour game". Characteristically EP Thompson went one stage further, dismissing "counter-factual fiction" as "unhistorical shit". Both pointed to the futility of pondering multiple variables in the past and the logical problem of assuming all other conditions remained constant. But despite their warnings, the thirst for virtual history remains undimmed. And while Carr was right to dismiss them as an amusing pastime, behind the light-hearted maybes lurk more uncomfortable historical and political agendas.
The conservatives who contribute to this literature portray themselves as battling against the dominant but flawed ideologies of Marxist and Whig history. Such analyses of the past, they say, never allow for the role of accident and serendipity. Instead, the past is presented as a series of milestones in an advance towards communism or liberal democracy. It is the calling of these modern iconoclasts to reintroduce the crooked timber of humanity back into history.
The unfortunate truth is that, rather than constituting a rebel grouping, "what if" history is eerily close to the mainstream of modern scholarship. The past 20 years has witnessed a brutal collapse in what was once called social history. The rigorous, data-based study of class, inequality, work patterns and gender relations has fallen away in the face of cultural history and post-modern inquiry.
Research into structures and processes, along with a search for explanation, is overshadowed by histories of understanding and meaning. In many cases this has led to a declining emphasis on the limitations that social context - class status, economic prospects, family networks - can place on the historical role of the individual. Instead, what we are offered in the postmodern world of contingency and irony is a series of biographical discourses in which one narrative is as valid as another. One history is as good as another and with it the blurring of factual, counter-factual and fiction. All history is "what if" history.
