SOURCE: “Some Revised Versions,” in The Spectator, April 26, 1997, pp. 34-5.

In the following review, Caute offers a negative evaluation of Virtual History.

This is another novelty item in the post-modernist pavilion of ‘what if?’ history. Virtual History begins with Niall Ferguson’s long, heavyweight and impressively erudite bombing raid on ‘determinist’ theories of history. He may be justified in putting down previous volumes in this genre, including If I Had Been … Ten Historical Fantasies (1979) and For Want of a Horse (1984), but the majority of the contributors to his own book are still writing orthodox history spiced by speculative passages.

Niall Ferguson would have us believe that ‘virtual history’ and ‘counterfactuals’ are hugely up against it. Up against what? Well, this whole entrenched, stubborn, lefty, unyielding thing called ‘determinism’, which bestrides the History Faculty and simply will not permit the idea that anything could have turned out other than...