What if Napoleon Had Landed?
John Cookson asks what might have happened had Napoleon actually landed on British soil in 1803-5.
The virtues of this question perhaps need to be stated. E.H. Carr dismissed the ‘might-have-beens of history’ as ‘a parlour game’; and he was right that the historian’s predominant concern must be with the past as it happened. Yet, at the very least, what might have happened does alert us to the contingency of events – the past need not have happened as it did. The danger of counter-factual speculation occurs when one ‘if’ is seen as setting off a sequence of events and an alternative narrative is constructed bearing little relation to the historical context.
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