The shaping of the American Empire

This paper creates a traditional, counterfactual, historical geography that proposes the rise of an American Empire in the 1800s instead of the British. The industrialization of the British world-economy of the early 1800s, victory in the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent success of the British Empire fundamentally depended on cotton textiles, thus on American cotton agriculture. Cotton was, to the economies of the nineteenth century, very much like oil is to those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first enturies. The development of the American cotton South after 1800 was based heavily on the reproduction of slaves within the South. Had Jefferson ended slavery, as he at one time considered, I suggest that an alternative America would have arisen in which Jeffersonian idealism would have encouraged family farms as the principal units of agricultural production. I further argue that, absent the availability of cheap British manufactures, the Philadelphia School of Protectionists would also have likely triumphed early and an American industrial development based on internal growth fueled by cotton grown on family farms would have allowed America to come to dominate the world-economy of the late 1800s. Protectionist policies would have similarly excluded French manufactures and the industrial development based on cotton the French were also attempting in the late 1700s would have failed just as did that of Britain. French military victory in the Napoleonic Wars would not have produced a French world-economy. An America without serious global opposition would not have resisted annexing all of Mexico and Canada in the 1840s and expanding aggressively into Asia via the Pacific basin and Hawaii to create an American Empire.     

Black-Atlantic counterfactualism: speculating about slavery and its aftermath

This paper critically examines the role of counterfactual thought and argument in a series of interconnected contexts that span what Paul Gilroy termed the ‘black Atlantic’ and what Ali Mazrui described as ‘Global Africa’. The paper aims to show that a more or less explicit use of conjecture and speculative reasoning has characterised attempts to represent and demand recognition for the horror, inhumanity and injustice of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery, and their legacies. To do so, the paper examines a number of interrelated examples, including the campaign for reparations for slavery in the USA; African demands for reparations for slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism that draw on ideas about the continent's ‘underdevelopment’; and speculative writing that imagines alternate historical geographies of slavery. The paper argues that their concerns with Atlantic slavery and its consequences evince a particular way of engaging with the past that might, at first sight, appear to be aligned with a broader temporal sensibility associated with notions of ghostly return, haunting and trauma. The paper argues, however, that such an assumption is mistaken and that the presence of counterfactualism here illustrates a rather different philosophy of history at work. By highlighting forms of making the past present that are speculative rather than spectral, the paper aims to open up new lines of geographical enquiry that will enhance understanding of Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.     

Counterfactual geographies: worlds that might have been

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.     

Counterfactualism,utopia, and historical geography: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Though counterfactual histories are treated with suspicion by some historians, they can be both useful and politically progressive. In fact it is possible to argue that counterfactual historical geographies might even be utopian. Though this seems counter-intuitive (how could alternative histories imagine a better future?), both histories and utopias encourage a kind of popular historicism, a sense that things have been (and could be) different. Whether this makes counterfactual fictions utopian depends on how you define utopia. Recent critical re-appraisals of the concept have suggested that we might think of it as a process, an ongoing critique of the present, not as an end in itself. Counterfactual histories can be utopian because they encourage a critique of teleology and determinism; their geographies can also be utopian because they remind us that spaces are multiple and open. A close reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (2002), a novel that describes a world without Europe after a more virulent version of the fourteenth-century plague kills everyone west of Constantinople, demonstrates that counterfactual historical fictions present an unequalled opportunity to reflect upon the practice of history. The novel also suggests that counterfactual historical fictions also allow for a critical evaluation of the nature of space. The paper concludes by demonstrating the value of counterfactual fictions through their representations of history, and of spaces of movement, multiplicity, and agonistic encounter.     

Counterfactual reasoning and method in historical geography

This paper connects philosophical debate concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of counterfactuals to the methodological concerns of historical geography. It argues that counterfactual claims are implied by a wide range of common epistemic judgements, specifically those regarding evidential support and explanatory connection. In addition it argues against those who have sought to restrict the use of counterfactuals to, in particular, rational action, or systems that are inherently chancy. Rather it argues in favour of an expanded role for counterfactual method in history and geography, in the forms of imaginary experiments and the questioning of ‘what might have been’.