What Room for Accident in History?: Explaining Big Changes by Small Events

Abstract

There is a kind of historiography that I would call optative: history as it might have, must have, should have been.' One would not expect to find much of it in economic history, a branch that likes to pride itself on hard reasoning and exact proof; but we have it here as well. The classic instance is the debate over the social consequences of the industrial revolution (optimists versus pessimists). Both sides have been generous and ingenious in their mobilization of facts; yet both sides are essentially immune to them. One takes sides here because of conviction not by evidence, but rather by sympathy. And so in other classically inexhaustible debates: optative history is to be found whenever deduction takes precedence over induction, when the end (the result desired) determines as well as justifies the means. I should like to devote my attention here to a special subspecies of the genus optative history-what we may call history as accident. As some might put it: there but for the grace of God . . . ; or for the wrath of God.... Or for the nonand unbelievers: a little nudge, and it could have, should have, gone the other way.

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