In some ways, historical fiction is an odd genre, almost contradictory: history, by definition, is not fiction, and strictly speaking fiction does not describe fact. Yet diction permits us sufficient leeway for this slight misuse of terms, and so we have this collection of books which are neither history nor entirely fiction but a meld of both – a fictionalized account of history, as it were.

One of the finest examples of historical fiction is undoubtedly Gates of Fire (1998). The first, and arguably best, of American novelist Steven Pressfield’s works, this book was a bestseller at release and is required reading at military academies in the United States. With good reason, because it is an excellent book all around and most definitely one of the best examples of historical fiction yet produced.

Gates of Fire tells a story most of us are familiar with, particularly after the high-profile release of the movie 300, based on the eponymous Frank Miller graphic novel, in 2006 (2007, in Singapore). The tale is that of the three hundred Spartan warriors who, along with their squires, helot servants and several hundred other Greek allies (who, sadly, are very often left out of modern depictions of the battle), held the pass of Thermopylae for some days (the sources differ) against Persian Emperor Xerxes’ overwhelmingly superior invading army. It was a defeat, but a last stand that came to epitomize last stands – a fight against hopeless odds which was to define all future futile but heroic efforts in battle.

The trouble with writing a book about such a well-known event, of course, is that everyone already knows what your work is going to be about. They most definitely know how it is going to end. How, then, are you going to surprise your readers and keep them reading? Pressfield manages this right from the introduction: he mentions a survivor dragged from the carnage, who is to be his narrator – and states that this narrator is not Spartan! More intriguingly, despite not being Spartan, he is dressed in the attire of a Spartiate officer. How this distinctly odd state of affairs comes about is what hooks the reader and keeps him or her reading.

Speaking of which, what is often forgotten, or to be a little fairer to chroniclers of the event past and present, simply not emphasized is that the Battle of Thermopylae was not a purely Spartan-Persian affair. The fact is that prior to this last stand, a several-thousand strong allied Greek force of which the 300 Spartans were but a part held the pass with equal valour against the ceaseless Persian waves. The Spartan last stand, as a matter of fact, was partly meant to cover the retreat of these allies. Some writers have gone yet further and ignored the Spartans’ squires and Thespian allies who stood with them to the end, and conferred upon the three hundred Spartans an almost mythical status; every man a shining Apollo of perfection, slaying Persians by the score until at last dying a flawlessly heroic death atop mounds of enemy corpses. Frank Miller, though he has produced a piece of sublime artwork and entertainment, can be accoutered worst of these sinners. It is not an accurate portrayal by any means, and a great injustice to the so many more who fought and died with astonishing bravery those bloody few days of 479BC.

Steven Pressfield does not make this common error. Gates of Fire, in fact, is told not from the perspective of a Spartan, but a squire; one Xeones, squire to Dienekes of “Then we will fight in the shade” fame. Discovered under the piles of mangled corpses after the battle, he is dragged out and resuscitated on orders of Xerxes himself, who wishes to hear of these Spartans who stood, “though unbound by liege law or servitude, facing insuperable odds and certain death, to the last man.”

Pressfield then proceeds to create an exceedingly wretched history for his narrator; Xeones is orphaned at ten when his city is sacked by Argives, supposedly allies, and he has to flee to the hills with his cousin Diomache and his family’s blind slave Bruxieus. Years pass and Xeones goes through horrific trials and tribulations, including being nailed bodily to a board of wood and displayed, for attempted theft, but eventually – almost miraculously – survives. One might question the need for such a long and detailed back-story, which appears to have little to do with the plot and the climactic event of the story, but it makes Xeones appear human to us. The best authors are those who can make their readers actually care for their characters, and in laying down such a detailed biography, Pressfield achieves this. Before the young Xeones has even got to Sparta, he has suffered any number of mishaps, ill fortune and cruelty. We sympathise with him, and we get to see how such experiences mould him into what he eventually becomes – the man who refuses, though he has the chance – nay, is offered the chance – to walk away from Thermopylae. Rather than a two-dimensional character in a storybook, he becomes real to us, and we can understand why he takes all the decisions that he does throughout the novel.

The author manages to do the same with practically all the characters he introduces, Persians included. That is another strong point of the book – versions of the tale too often fail to emphasize the Persian role at Thermopylae, preferring rather to treat them as one-dimensional villains and transform the battle into a showdown between good (Spartans) and evil (Persians). Herodotus, of course, had good reason to do this. He was a Greek, after all. For modern authors, moral absolutism usually sells better. Coupled with the fact that virtually no notable Persian sources have come down to us, this results usually in the story being told only from one main perspective. Pressfield manages to tell it from three: Spartans, Greek allies/non-Spartan squires and Persians. Although fictionalized, I suspect this makes it the most complete account of the battle in existence, Herodotus included.

This is the book’s greatest achievement, even though it is an excellently-told tale in its own right. By avoiding the casting of two diametrical opposites of good and evil, Pressfield brings to us a nuanced view of the battle, in particular, and the Greco-Persian Wars in general. Inevitably, the Spartans still come off as the heroes of the story, but the line is blurred. Despite not having a Spartan villain, Pressfield still manages to present implied criticism of Spartan society, which has produced the best warriors of Greece and the known world, by recounting in painstaking detail the incredible trials and travails needed to mould Spartan youths into these fearless paragons of martial virtue. He questions Lakedamonian religious devotion and the Spartan ethos of glory through death in battle, using Dienekes’ wife Arete as his mouthpiece. About to be widowed for the second time as Dienekes readies to set out for the Hot Gates, she declares bitterly that “They [the Gods] give with one hand and take with the other, answerable only to their own unknowable laws.” Having already lost one husband in battle, she now has to watch another, and the man she truly loved, march off to certain death. It is not difficult for the reader to imagine her pain and to empathise with her plight.

Aside from creating characters the reader comes to care about, Pressfield also thus manages to make every major character, not just Xeones, human and believable. That is by no means easy, just as it is difficult to avoid falling into the trap of moral absolutism. From Dienekes to Polynikes, who initially seems villainous, to the lady Arete, the centre of most of the book’s most emotional scenes, every single character can be perceived as mortal. While most other characterizations of Spartan women have them as noble, stoic and unyielding paragons of Hellenic womanly virtue, Pressfield shows us the conflict in their hearts. Arete tells Xeones of how the women from other Greek cities marvel at the strength of the Spartan women. “They think we are made of stauncher stuff than they. I will tell you, Xeo. We are not.” What could be more human than such raw, mortal grief?

After the emotional farewells comes the battle itself. Several days of holding out against the Persian assaults leave the Greeks bloodied and battered. Unlike the perfectly choreographed blood splatters of 300, the fighting in Gates of Fire receives more prosaic treatment. Descriptions abound of a hard, ungodly filthy slog, on a battlefield churned into mud by thousands of pairs of feet, blood, urine and other bodily secretions. Death comes suddenly, swiftly or deliberately, with survivors conscious that they are probably only alive by luck rather than skill. As any combat veteran is likely to attest, a battle is basically one chaotic lottery; the difference in this case though, for the Spartans, is that they all know they are going to die. It is just a matter of time for them.

All the hard fighting, after some time, predictably wears down the Greek force. It is at this juncture that Pressfield does something slightly baffling; he presents us with a somewhat implausible scenario. A common ruffian, once Xeones’ companion, is captured; he claims knowledge of the location of Great King Xerxes’ command tent. In a desperate attempt to actually win the battle, a select squad of Spartan warriors is sent to assassinate the Persian ruler. This turn in the plot, while not entirely implausible, smacks somewhat of a deus ex machina to me – with the difference, of course, that they did not actually succeed. It also seems to me that the very idea of such a raid is at odds with the stated Spartan ethos of glory and honour on the battlefield. If they came prepared to die and go down in glorious defeat, why resort to such obviously underhand methods to end the war? The argument can of course be made that the Spartans simply wanted to spare Greece any more fighting and destruction of any nature, as even a victorious war could be ruinous. However, it still does not sit very well with me. Happily, this is just about the only nitpick I have with Gates of Fire.

Pressfield, however, superbly carries off the description of the raid. All his characters fight with believable courage for a lost cause, a microcosm of the larger battle at hand. It all, of course, ends in failure. It would have ruined the entire work had the author so abruptly changed the course of history. Almost the entire party is killed or wounded, and the farewells are imbued with the kind of raw emotion that makes a reader actually feel sad at the losses. Pressfield’s ability to make his readers care for his characters deserves yet another mention. He also manages a very tender, moving conciliation between two characters during this segment, fittingly and gently closing off one life. To put it baldly, I have not read any author better at killing off characters than Steven Pressfield.

Inevitably, the Persians come on again; from two sides this time, guided by the infamous Greek traitor Ephialtes in exchange for gold. The Christian faith has Judas; the Greeks, Ephialtes, and he is still remembered in Greece to this day as one of antiquity’s great traitors. The Spartans, true to their word, fight to the very last drop of blood. Xeones survives to relate the tale, which “by bitter irony” as the Persian court historian Gobartes puts it, is completed on the very day of the catastrophic Persian naval defeat at Salamis. Without ships to ensure a steady flow of supplies for the army, the campaign is over. Xerxes departs for Persepolis, leaving an army under his trusted general and kinsman Mardonius to finish the job. This army is crushed by the combined Greek forces, including a full mobilization of Spartan manpower (one of the very few times it ever happened) the very next year at the battle of Plataea. Gobartes, captured in the rout, is spared as he mentions Xeones and is able to correctly answer questions about the latter’s eventual fate. The novel ends with the famous inscription that can still be seen on a memorial at Thermopylae; in English,

Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,

that here obedient to their laws we lie.

Gates of Fire is one of the most compelling, moving and historically accurate fictionalized accounts of this famous battle, and fully deserves the acclaim it has been given. The actual evidence for even one of the great last stands of history is desperately thin; from these few scraps Steven Pressfield has managed to weave a tale that is both believable and touching. It is no mean feat. While the battle itself decided little, its memory lives on as an enduring symbol of honour and a tribute to resilience and camaraderie. Such a memorable battle deserves to be immortalized in an equally memorable account, and Gates of Fire, though technically fiction, is just such an account.

In my introductory essay, I remarked that history can turn on a coin. Franz Urban could have easily avoided making his fatal mistake of June 28^th, 1914, or he could have made a completely different error altogether. Simply by going the right way, or making a wrong turn into another street, he could have saved the life of the archduke, and perhaps Europe could have been spared World War One. Or Europe could have plunged itself into flames anyway, the war beginning on a different day with a different spark and a different set of national alignments. We don’t know for sure, but the possibilities are certainly intriguing.

To speculate on all these possibilities is to step into the arena of counterfactual history. History is the tale of what happened; counterfactual history is the story of what could have happened – how a historical event could have taken place in another way and what repercussions this would have had. It is a relatively new, and much-maligned, area of historiography, and I intend to demonstrate here that it has considerable utility and most definitely does not deserve all the scorn poured upon it over the years.

Counterfactualism in history is not new. Roman historian Tacitus mused about Germanicus, Augustus’ son and the able general who picked up the pieces after the devastating Roman defeat in the Teutoburg Forest, living a full life; he actually died in AD 19, aged just thirty-four under somewhat controversial circumstances. More recently, in 1907, the renowned Whig historian G.M. Trevelyan produced an essay revolving around a Napoleonic victory at the Battle of Waterloo. Later in the century, no less a luminary than Sir Winston Churchill dabbled in the topic, wondering in one of his writings how the world would have turned out if Confederate General Robert E. Lee had beaten his Union counterpart Meade at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1862. Unfortunately, the work in which this contribution appeared, If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), was the last significant text on counterfactual history to appear for the next six decades.

The revival of the medium began in 1991, when the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Hawthorn published Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, which evaluated a number of counterfactual scenarios, including the Black Death and the Korean War. This work helped inspire Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, in 1997, and since then counterfactual history has been gaining both increased popularity and increased academic acceptance.

At roughly the same time, the genre of alternate history fiction saw a renaissance of its own, which no doubt aided the cause of counterfactual history. Robert Harris’ bestselling Fatherland (1992), set in a world where Nazi Germany won World War Two, is often cited today as one of the seminal works of this genre, and there is no doubt that is impact was great. Well-known American science fiction and fantasy writer Harry Turtledove was next to perpetuate the phenomenon, producing, in 1994, his Worldwar series; a sci-fi/alternate history series that postulated an alien invasion smack in the middle of the Second World War. He followed this up in 1997 with what is popularly known as the Timeline-191 series, which explored the consequences of Lee’s famous “lost orders” (Special Orders 191, hence the label) never being lost, and the Union hence losing the American Civil War. Turtledove has also produced Departures (1993) and Counting Up, Counting Down (2002), a series of short stories set in alternate history worlds – including one, intriguingly, where the Prophet Mohammed stayed a merchant and never founded Islam – along with a whole series of stand-alone alternate history novels. His most recent alternate history work is the Infamy duology, where Japan cemented its successful attack on Pearl Harbour by invading and occupying Hawaii.

There is no doubt that the success of these books has cast the spotlight on alternate history, and by extension, on counterfactual history as well. Yet this is a very recent trend; before the 1990s, counterfactual history spent six decades in the academic wilderness, mercilessly scorned by well-known historians such as E.H. Carr, who labeled it an “idle parlour game”, and E.P. Thompson, who derided it as “unhistorical shit.” In no way was it considered a serious part of the discipline, and one is moved to question: why?

We have to first consider the role of historical determinism. Simply put, determinism holds that the course of events in history has already been mapped out – as Hegel put it, “by vast impersonal forces”. In this case, there would be little point considering what could have happened instead, because all historical occurrences are pre-destined. It would be right, if this were so, to label counterfactualism an “idle parlour game”.

Unfortunately, a close examination shows that many of the most significant events in world history have been anything but pre-destined. Chance and luck have played an enormous role in determining the course of history; one of the best examples, of course, is the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. There are a good number more, the more significant including: a twenty-year-old Alexander the Great nearly dying at the Granicus, years before he gained the moniker, saved only by the timely intervention of a bodyguard; the especially wet summer of 1526 scuttling Suleiman the Magnificent’s advance on Vienna and a potential body blow to Western Christendom; and Mongol Khakhan Ogodai’s fortuitous passing in 1241 leading to a Mongol retreat from Europe, where previously they had swept all before them.

These are only some of the more famous points where history could have diverged; perhaps you could take some time and wonder at the effects, undoubtedly great, if things had gone the other way – as they so easily could have. Yet if it is this simple to show that determinism is not a viable way of examining history, why was counterfactualism spurned for so long, and is still not fully accepted in intellectual circles today?

This could be due to a poor reputation, gained due to much of the literature produced on the subject being sub-standard. Counterfactual texts may suffer from a couple of major failings: one, wish fulfillment; two, something known as the “Cleopatra’s Nose” phenomenon.

Wish fulfillment is, as the name implies, a case where the writer creates a counterfactual scenario to fulfill personal conscious or unconscious desires, or to perpetuate a personal agenda. This in itself is not exactly harmful, but it often results in the projection of an extremely far-fetched counterfactual scenario. An early example would be French author Louis Geoffroy’s 1836 work, Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812-1832) (Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) – a title that is self-explanatory. Geoffroy took a reasonable premise – that Napoleon had not marched on Moscow in 1812, but instead pursued, challenged and defeated the army of Tsar Alexander – and turned it into a timeline that borders on pure fantasy. As Adam Zamoyski relates, the victory over Russia was followed by an invasion of Britain, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Asia and Africa, such that by his death in 1832, Geoffroy’s Napoleon ruled the world (Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, 2004). Clearly, Geoffroy was reacting to France’s fall from European hegemony after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815; his reaction, apparently, was to retreat into a fantasy universe where France ruled a world empire. This might be an extreme example, but it does show mankind’s boundless imagination and how serious writers of counterfactual history would do well not to let their emotions rule their work. Counterfactual scenarios as the one above, or works of alternate history fiction which perpetuate such far-fetched scenarios, create a bad name for counterfactualism in general.

The other problem we have to examine is intriguingly named the “Cleopatra’s Nose” phenomenon, where relatively insignificant details are postulated to cause huge changes in the course of history. This way of thinking gets its name from a popular theory that had Cleopatra lacked natural beauty (i.e. for instance, had an uglier nose), Mark Antony would not have been smitten by her, would not have been distracted by his love and would have crushed Octavian in the Roman civil war – thus thoroughly changing the course of Roman, and by extension, Western history.

Perhaps you can already spot the way in which this scenario is problematic. It is highly possible that Cleopatra could have turned out ugly (in fact, it has been suggested from archaeological evidence that she was not the beauty she has often been said to be), but it does not then follow that without her distracting influence, Mark Antony would have won the civil war and become ruler of the Roman Empire; notice how Octavian is distinctly underrated, reduced to the status of a non-entity, in the above description? It is then a highly questionable hypothesis.

We can thus see, from the above laughable hypotheticals, that good counterfactual history also demands an element of logic. We can imagine with a good degree of plausibility that Napoleon had succeeded in his invasion of Russia in 1812, but to go on to say that he would take this victory as a stepping stone to world conquest is going too far. We can envisage a hypothetical Muslim victory at Tours in A.D. 732, but it would be difficult, to say the least, to see how this could have led to the “dreaming minarets of Oxford” which Edward Gibbon fantasized about. We can gaze over half-a-century’s distance and say that Hitler would have won the war had he advanced through North Africa instead of launching Operation Barbarossa, but there are problems with this scenario as well. Like any good historian, a counterfactual historian must examine the available evidence and come up with a reasonable viewpoint. If he wants to make a bold assertion, he has to back it up, even though his assertion is hypothetical. The only good counterfactuals are plausible ones.

It is therefore easy to see how counterfactual history can be useful. By considering a number of alternative scenarios, one can better understand the root causes of a particular historical event. For example, there are many competing theories regarding the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which ascribe it variously to divergent occurrences. By taking each major occurrence, and considering the effect (or lack thereof) if it had not occurred (or had not occurred in the manner it did), the relative importance of all these factors can be weighed. If the vast barbarian migrations had not occurred, or occurred on a much smaller scale, might Rome have survived? If the Empire had an abler hand at the helm during these dark years of invasion and internal strife, could it have weathered the storm? By considering “what if”, we will be able to gain a clearer picture of “what was”.

Even more importantly, counterfactualism reveals the important role of chance in history, and throws into question our assumption that certain historical events were somewhat inevitable. The simplest example is the Second World War. The Allied victory and Axis defeat is virtually taken for granted today. Yet the Axis had numerous chances, if not quite for victory, then at least for dealing crippling blows which would have made Allied recovery far more difficult. Hitler, for reasons still obscure today, ordered his panzers to halt in front of the beaten, bewildered British Expeditionary Force being taken off at Dunkirk – if he had allowed them to continue, in the flush of victory over France, Britain would have lost most of its regular army. As it was, the British had to leave behind most of their heavy equipment, but managed to rescue 300,000 soldiers to form the core of a brand new citizen army. Could Britain have recovered and remained an active partner in the rest of the war if it had lost these 300,000 combat veterans in the summer of 1940?

One-and-a-half years later on the other side of the world, the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were to escape destruction at Pearl Harbour by sheer good fortune. Out to sea on the morning on December 7^th, 1941, the fleet’s most important ships (although perhaps no one realized that at the time) survived the Japanese surprise attack that killed over 2,000 Americans. In addition, the Japanese failed to strike the oil storage tanks at the waterfront; urged to launch a final wave for this purpose, the cautious Japanese commander Admiral Chuichi Nagumo hesitated. He was to decide, erroneously, that enough damage had been done to the American war effort and order his ships to turn for home. What if he had not? What if the carriers had been in port and had been lost? Without carriers or oil stocks, an American recovery in the Pacific would have been far harder.

Yet, astonishingly, this is not the greatest stroke of luck the Americans had in the Pacific War. That was to come in arguably its decisive battle: Midway. With three fleet carriers against Japan’s four, and no aircraft superior to the then-devastatingly effective Japanese Zeros, the odds were weighed against the US Pacific Fleet. And so it seemed for most of the battle, as American airstrikes crumbled in the face of superior Japanese fighter patrols. The Japanese had, of course, launched strikes of their own, and their aircraft needed to refuel and restock ammunition. It was during one of these lulls, at an exact fortuitous moment, that the skies cleared and American torpedo bombers happened to be overhead. Without the combat air patrols – currently being refuelled – which had performed so superbly up till then, the Japanese could only throw up flak and hope; in vain, as it turned out. Within ten minutes, three Japanese carriers were ablaze; helped by the vast quantities of munitions on their decks, ready to be loaded into waiting aircraft. The fourth carrier was caught and sunk the next day. The Japanese lost 4 fleet carriers and 228 aircraft; with the planes went some of her best pilots. It was the turning point of the Pacific War, and it was all due to chance. The Japanese had the advantage of numbers and quality – it was they who would likelier have won the battle, if not for this extraordinary turn of fortune for the Americans. A Japanese victory at Midway would have certainly meant, at the very least, a far harder climb to victory for the Americans.

The inevitability of history is thus a fallacy. By recognizing how much of a “close-run thing” (Wellington, after Waterloo) it can be, we will have a more accurate view of the event in question. Misleading perceptions can be gotten rid of – perceptions that often come by because history is almost always written by the victors. A more holistic, fairer picture of the event in question emerges. What is more, good knowledge of the subject at hand is need to postulate plausible counterfactuals; to prove a scenario, one needs to research on the events, personalities, trends and figures of the period, and in doing so he will gain an increased understanding of this period or event he is looking at.

Counterfactuals by themselves can also have the effect of triggering debate on the subject. If a scenario is found implausible, proof must be presented. In seeking this proof, new evidence could come to light which completely changes popular perceptions. The benefits of a civil discussion on the subject will accrue to all – it could turn out, eventually, to be a very useful learning experience for everyone concerned. Even implausible counterfactuals can aid in this area, albeit indirectly – by meticulously going through these fantastical scenarios, a student of history can learn how to spot fallacies and other undesirable devices of argument, and thus to avoid them in his own works.

Thus, in conclusion, we can see that counterfactual history is most definitely more than an “idle parlour game”. It has some very real uses, and should definitely be regarded as a respectable area of academic study. It enables one to take a far broader, fairer and less biased view of history, and clears up the many misconceptions and inaccuracies prevalent within popular history. With such benefits, there is absolutely no reason to continue to decry and overlook this vital area of the discipline.

Sarajevo, June 28^th, 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is on a visit to the capital of the Empire’s newest province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Anti-Austrian feeling has run high since the annexation of 1909, and on this very day an anarchist plot is afoot to assassinate the Archduke. Seven members of the Serbian terrorist group, the Black Hand, have fanned out across the city, in position to strike a blow against the hated and oppressive empire.

Somehow, throughout the day, all fail; but just as their cause seems lost, Fate intervenes. Deciding to visit the wounded victims of one of these attempts, Franz Ferdinand orders his driver, Franz Urban, to head for the city hospital. The driver is unfamiliar with the route dictated by Bosnian Governor, General Oskar Potiorek, and makes a wrong turn.

It will turn out to be history’s costliest wrong turn. Nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of the conspirators who had earlier in the day missed his opportunity, is ruing his poor luck at a nearby café. He looks up and sees a very familiar car struggling to manoeuvre out of the narrow street…

Several shots later, the archduke and his wife are dead. Just over a month after the incident, all Europe is aflame. The war will last four years, see over ten million dead and even more wounded, bring down four European empires and unrecognizably alter the world.

But what of the man who fired the shots, and the driver whose wrong mistake gave him his chance? Gavrilo Princip was fated to die of tuberculosis in the last year of the war. Franz Urban survived World War I, but little else is known about him. No one even has any idea of when and where he died. Both were obscure characters, immortalized by acts which on their own would have had little significance, but which set in motion a chain of events that would have momentous consequences for the entire world.

That encapsulates one of history’s defining principles – that it can turn on a coin, made in a split-second by a completely ordinary individual who returns to being a completely ordinary individual after his act. It also highlights another principle: that the past is murky, and that historians almost never do have all the details, or any way of attaining all the details. There is no definitive account of this assassination, one of the best-known and most-studied events in history; what chance do all the thousands and millions other far less perceptible occurrences have?

But let us leave aside this apparent problem for the moment, and consider what are the three most popular perceptions of history (at least in Singapore, and in my opinion): one, that it is “all about dates”; two, that is it all about memorization; and three, “history is DEAD.”

I have heard all of the above expressed in varied forms a great number of times over the years. I believe they are grave misconceptions, but of course I do not blame people for being misinformed. It all does seem attractively simple: history is the study of the past; what happened has already happened and we have no way of changing that – so what is the whole point of studying it? Additionally, since history is the study of the past, dates and events must be essential, so I suppose I’ll have to begin cramming my head with dates and facts – if one does not know the events that occurred and when they occurred, how can one be a student of history? Or, more pertinently to Singapore perhaps, how can one do well in history exams?

I’m hardly going to deny that factual knowledge is an integral part of the study of history, because to do that would be ludicrous. Obviously, before you study any event, you need to know what happened and when it happened. But history is not all about memorizing dates and facts – what is even more important is knowing the significance of those dates and facts. People don’t seem to realize this, and then proceed to complain about the pointlessness of history; I would agree that if history was only about the study of dates and events that it would be very tedious indeed. But that is a much too simple appraisal.

That would bring me to the third point: that history is dead. On the contrary; history is far from dead. Anyone who has studied history in some depth will know that differing accounts exist about the same event. Numerous accounts exist about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, all disagreeing in largely minor ways, but different nonetheless. Moving beyond that, countless volumes have been written assessing the murder, with very varied viewpoints on its significance and impact. There are no uncontroversial events in world history; the difference is only in the degree. We might even know, more or less, what exactly transpired – but the motives of the main players can be in serious question. For, as stated above, the study of a historical event involves much more than knowing what occurred, on what day, at what time and in what sequence.

Controversy and debate are thus integral parts of the study of history. These can get very lively, to put it euphemistically, particularly when historical events call into question national honour. How can one, then, label such a subject that attracts such frenzied argument, raises such hackles and invokes such livid emotions as “dead”? And I’m not even touching upon counterfactualism here: as I earlier expressed, history can turn on a coin. What if Franz Urban had got his directions right? Would we have had the First World War? How would the 20^th century have panned out instead? What would the world look like today? Such questions have no easy answers, and the scenarios which can be postulated are endlessly fascinating. History, “dead”? I think not.

Somewhat more intelligent and justified criticisms have been made about history, however, and it is to those which we must now turn. Cynically, history has been said never to be just history, but “history for” – i.e., that history is always written for a purpose, usually self-serving. It is difficult to refute such a statement; plenty of countries use history to their advantage, the frequent China-Japan rows being one excellent example. Yet this should not be utilized as a condemnation of the subject as a whole. Distortions of history inevitably will occur, and are of course odious, but I prefer to see the utilization of history for national aims as one more purpose it can fulfill. We should not try to pretend that the pursuit of history should be a pure, unambiguous hunt for the truth, and that the discipline itself has snowy-white morals. That is being idealistic to the point of foolishness. Of course people make use of history to get ahead and to attain their personal goals – the nature of humanity, after all, appears to be to use practically anything to get ahead and to attain personal goals. It is no reason to decry the study of history.

It has also been said, in various forms but most famously by Henry Ford, that “history is more or less bunk”. E.H. Carr put it euphemistically: “History is a series of accepted judgements.” Quite simply, there is usually no way of knowing the exact truth about an event. Bits and pieces will undoubtedly be missing; quite often, large chunks are. The historian has not much more to go on than guesswork and extrapolations from fragmentary available evidence. Or there could simple be too much evidence; too many eyewitness accounts, all of which claim different things. Who does the historian believe?

This lack of definitive accounts, as I have earlier expressed, is a serious problem indeed. Even such a famous event as the killing of the Austrian archduke has no firm, set-in-stone version of events. But this by no means is a message to historians to pack it in, quit their jobs and find alternative employment. In fact, it is an invitation to intensify the study of history. It makes history a challenge – to uncover more facts, to revise previous accounts, to come to a greater understanding of the world around us and how it all came to be so.

And that, for me, is the purpose of history: to understand our world better and know how it all came to be so. E.H. Carr put it best:

“The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.”

Understanding history is key to understanding current world affairs; and if you are not interesting in understanding current world affairs, you’re better off not existing at all, rather than adding one more dumb mouth to the masses of willfully ignorant.

Additionally, studying history helps us learn not just about ourselves but from the past as well. A lengthy quote from Collingwood would suffice on this point:

“History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”

Indeed, knowing “what man has done”, and learning from it, is one of the main motivations for studying history.

History, then, is not merely memorization of facts and dates. History is not all about events and obsessing over the times and sequences and exact manner of occurrences. History is, undeniably, about studying what happened, but also why it happened, how it happened and how else it could have happened – not to mention who made it happen and why they made it happen. Facts and dates are means to achieving these ends, and thus must take a backseat to argument – to perspective.

This is because history is, arguably, all about perspective. The same event, the same facts, can be used to justify two entirely different viewpoints. Let us consider, for example, the British construction of fortified “New Villages” during the Malayan Emergency of 1948-60. We know for a fact that these settlements were built – but the two antagonists saw this action very differently. The British claimed that the villages were for the safety of the Malayan population; to protect them from the murderous Communist guerillas of Chin Peng. The MCP on the other hand saw the measure as oppressive; tantamount to building concentration camps to deny the Communists the fruits of popular support. One fact, two viewpoints – which is right? Who do we believe?

The fact is both views make sense: and the historian’s job is to look at the evidence at hand, pick one side based upon his interpretation of this evidence, and argue for it. The debate can only be good for knowledge; facts and motives uncovered will in all probability give us a much better understanding of the Malayan Emergency as a whole. By then considering why and how the Emergency failed, we can then look at how other Communist insurgencies fared – and perhaps understand better how to battle terrorism today. The reasons for its failure may also lead us to a better understanding of why, for instance, Communism has been almost wiped out in the world today. In this way, we pick up lessons from the past; in this way, we can understand the present better by studying what transpired.

To conclude, history is a vital discipline. It does have its flaws, but I believe we should not be too hung up about them: the fact that we very often cannot find out the whole truth is no reason to give up its pursuit, and the abuse of history by governments and people should take nothing away from the usefulness of studying history. It is self-knowledge we need – and it is history which can grant us this self-knowledge.

Welcome. A Wrong Turn is a history blog; its purpose is to contain all my musings and articles about history, as well as the occasional piece of historical news which I will assess. I hope that the fact that you are reading this indicates possession of an interest in history; if so, I hope you will stay for the ride.

Let us then get started with the very first article: History – What it is and why we need it.