On Sale: Sep 1, 2000
Page Count: 560 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9780465023233

$29.99

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Leading historians explore what might have been if nine of the most decisive moments in modern history had never happened.

“A welcome, optimistic assault on an intellectual heresy that has done much, much more harm than good.” –Sunday Times (UK)

What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Ireland had never been divided? What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Hitler had invaded Britain or had defeated the Soviet Union? What if Russians had won the Cold War? What if Kennedy had lived? What if there had been no Gorbachev?

This book is a delightful but historically rigorous series of separate voyages into “imaginary time” and provides intriguing, far-reaching answers to these questions. Virtual History features contributions from talented, imaginative, and well-regarded historians, led by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s ninety-page introduction is a brilliant manifesto-like defense of the methodology of counterfactual history and offers a convincing justification of the whole enterprise. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from the maintenance of Stuart rule in England. This breathtaking narrative paints a picture of our world that is convincingly skewed: from the accession of “James III” in 1701 and a Nazi-occupied England, to U.S. Prime Minister Kennedy who lives to complete his term and the “Sultan of Baghdad” Saddam Hussein.

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Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, The Ascent of Money, Civilization, and Empire.

“Fluent and entertaining.”
Times (UK)
“Ferguson constructs an entire scenario starting with Charles I’s defeat of the Covenanters, running through three revolutions, the American, the French and the Russian – that did not happen and climaxing with the collapse of the West, ruled by an Anglo American empire, in the face of a mighty transcontinental, tsarist Russian imperium… A welcome, optimistic assault on an intellectual heresy that has done much, much more harm than good.”
Brian Appleyard, Sunday Times (UK)
“The implications of Virtual History deserve to be meditated by every historian… a talented and imaginative team of historians who tackle with counterfactual verve a series of mostly twentieth century turning points.”
Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Sizzling essays hot from the academic griddle.”
Mail on Sunday (UK)
“Quite brilliant, inspiring for the layman and an enviable tour de force for the informed reader… A wonderful book… lucid, exciting, and easy to read.”
Literary Review

Niall Ferguson

About the Author

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, The Ascent of Money, Civilization, and The War of the World.

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