Historians are trained to the question of what would have happened otherwise.
The is well founded and is applied more consistently than the discipline's own practice allows.
Any claim that something caused something else contains a , whether or not it is stated.
To say that a harvest failure caused a is to say that without the failure there would have been no .
Historians make such claims constantly and object to the form only when it is made .
The objection is therefore not to reasoning but to .
The distinction is one of distance from the actual world.
Removing one event and holding everything else fixed is a controlled and disciplined operation.
Removing a long-running structural condition requires rebuilding a world about which nothing can be known.
The first has been used productively for decades under other names.
Economic historians estimating the contribution of railways removed the railways and kept the .
The exercise produced a smaller figure than anyone expected and changed the field.
It was criticised as speculative and it was the most disciplined argument then available.
What makes such work defensible is that the alternative is specified precisely enough to be attacked.
A vague cannot be wrong and therefore cannot be useful.
The practical rule that has emerged is to change one thing, name it, and stop.
Narratives that change one thing and then narrate forty years of consequences have left the method behind.
They are a literary , which is a respectable thing to be and a different thing from history.