Changes

As time marches on, it is plainly a little more difficult to construct counterfactuals. Without introducing too many spoilers into this review, he ‘creates’ the Ascona Seven, a League of Nations formed in 1947 which includes the five major European powers, the United States and Japan. He has Winston Churchill advocating Irish independence and crossing the floor to join the Labour party. He has revolution in Russia in 1917 but it is a failure, with Lenin, Trotsky and the other ringleaders killed or imprisoned, although who the ‘strong man’ who assumes power after a period in which ‘an imperfect democracy’ struggles to survive, he does not speculate. He has a major European crisis in 1918, the United States becoming the world’s leading economic power by 1930, a cold war between the Germanic and Anglo-American populations, and a series of nuclear crises which ultimately lead to war in 1975. An alternative counterfactual is sketched in a few pages later, one in which a severe polio epidemic in Britain in 1972 claims John Lennon and David Cameron among its victims, and a German nuclear weapon explodes above a Royal Air Force base in Suffolk that same year. We also read that Richard Nixon might have become a Methodist minister, and that Nigeria gives the world its first black Pope.

For anybody fascinated by political or social history, this is an a stimulating book that will inevitably lead to some thought as to how the world could have developed, and how it could so easily have been a very different place today. The author assumes a fair level of knowledge on the part of the reader, without which it would probably prove heavy going. To call it ‘entertaining’ might not be strictly accurate, and I doubt if that was the intention. But as ‘alternative history’ for the well-informed, and at around 230 pages just the right length not to outstay its welcome, I would certainly recommend this.

To see how the century really evolved instead, we recommend [[Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder]]; and for an account of what actually happened in June 1914, [[The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans]]. [[Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd]] will tell you how it all ended.