Yes the virtual history stuff can be fun. But to pursue Kleiman's thoughts on Columbus as an emissary of Henry VII, it's based on the quaint idea that debilitating reactionary populism is something that flowed from Iberian colonization only. Dubya is busy correcting that hypothesis.

Also the problem of the Huge influx of gold that did a number on the Spainish economy would, in this hypothetical, now have gone into and radically altered the English economy.

Mark's last comment - about the randomness that seems to shift the fate of nations - raises a question:

Some (many) alternative history theorists (thinkers? buffs?) hold that history is elastic, and tendencies override chance. Thus, if not Oswald's bullet, then another's. Or perhaps some other event that would marginalize Kennedy. The question is, Is this just an easy out to avoid the metaphysical horror of thinking that better vote-counting in a few counties in FL in 2000 could have averted Abu Ghraib, Iraq, or even 9-11? Is History inevitable, or does it all come down to Shroedinger's cats?

I do not understand why this is a frightening concept. If history was a mechanical chess game with all the moves grand and planned out, that to me would be the more stark and forbidding reality to live in.

It is the randomness that provides the space in which personal compassion, virtue, and heroism might make the difference that shifts worlds. If history is an unstoppable juggernaut, why stand in its way?

You may also find interesting a strange coincidence recounted in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Around the year 570 A.D., the Abyssinians (who were Christians) attacked the city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. They were defeated by the Koreish, residing in Arabia, who were pagans. The Kaaba, in the center of Mecca, remained full of pagan idols. A few years later, Mohammed was born.

What if the Abyssinians had won the battle and brought Christianity to the Arabian peninsula before the rise of Islam?

I suppose it's just a personal bias, but I don't think we need to worry that randomness is being overrated. While it's fun to consider what would have happen if pirates had killed Caesar, the important point not the difference one changed outcome would make, but is the enormouse randomness of history. Ego leads us humans to write lots of books about people, far fewer about the weather, disease and other factors beyond human control, when considering how we ended up where we are, but that probably gets the weight of influence badly wrong.

Rather than thinking about what would have happened if Kennedy hadn't been killed, or if England had colonized all of the Americas, or Caesar hadn't lived to full manhood, think about what the world would be like if Caesar hadn't lived AND England colonized all the Americas AND Hitler had become an artist AND Kennedy had lived AND the Supreme Court had not decided the 2000 election AND... You can't do it, other than just to make things up. Too much randomness along the way.

"But to pursue Kleiman's thoughts on Columbus as an emissary of Henry VII, it's based on the quaint idea that debilitating reactionary populism is something that flowed from Iberian colonization only."

And on the assumption that it was the character of the colonizers, not the indigenous civilizations, that shaped the ensuing history. But it's important to note that in many cases the Spaniards simply decapitated existing highly-developed authoritarian hierarchies. The character of Mexican society is arguably more Aztec (and Toltec and Zapotec etc.) than it is Spanish. In the counter-example of Costa Rica, the most democratic country in Central America, the indigenous people were a collection of tribal societies (more like those in North America). They were too difficult to enslave--hence, no grand colonial cathedrals in Costa Rica (don't bother going there for the architecture).

If we're going to compare the results of Spanish vs. English colonialization, wouldn't it make more sense to look at (say) Jamaica vs. the Dominican Republic? Apples to apples, and all that?

My personal favorite: what if Wittgenstein and Hitler hadn't known each other as youngsters?

And of course there is the philosophical theory proposing an infinite number of universes; in which there is indeed a world where Columbus did sail for Britain and people in that world are wondering what would have happened if Isabella had met with that charming mercenary.

Back at the ranch, randomness tells us that we always have to be aware of the details, that anything can destroy our careful and meticulous plans and lets not be too wedded to any particular theory beyond its useful life.

'Tis not writ, but why randomness? There'r no gibbons, 'twas chance that brought us here. At any time, all things are possible; some more so than others. It's these odds actions sway.

KHarris

Tolstoy's theory of history, as wonderfully developed in War and Peace, would have history at once described thoroughly as all of our histories. Napoleon thought he was France, but France was ultimately each of the gunners of the Grand Army as they marched toward Moscow, and each of the families that provided for the gunners to have left France for what ever symbollic reason. Kutuzov, the Russian commander, knew Napoleon was not France nor was Kutuzov nor the Tsar Russia. The gunners of the Grand Army spent themselves along the way to Moscow, so they capture of Moscow meant nothing. With the gunners gone, Napoleon was of no account. History then for Tolstoy is understood as all of our histories apart from our heroic views that we can make the world after our images.

peBird,

Do I detect a modal realist?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631224262/qid=1106590265/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-6522537-5092120

It was not gold that America shipped to Spain but silver from Potosi and Mexico. The Spanish Empire was a silver empire. Furthermore the so-called inflation that resulted in Europe in the 16th century was extremely tame. About 1% per annum. Hardly a raging inflation.

Yes inflation was 1% per annum, but historians call it the great inflaion.

If you look at inflation data there are three peiods of inflation -- one because of technological breakthrough in mining silver, the second the importation of gold & silver from the new world, and third, the 20th century switch to fiat money.

Moreover, Spains real problem was not inflation, but that all that wealth allowed them to keep the old means of production and power while England, Holland and others developed new products,production processes and social organizations to earn the gold away from Spain.

" Imagine what the world would be like today if Palm Beach hadn't used that 'butterly ballot.'"

Maybe they should rename it the "butterfly ballot effect."

I once tried to write a story where I went about a decade and a half back in time. One of the things I realized I had to contend with was the effect of randomness on external events - that anything and everything could happen differently, not just the events I affected directly. That would've killed the story if other factors hadn't.

If all of South America had been colonized by England, it would probably look at lot like Guyana, not Toronto.

A much better explanation than the mystic "protestant ethic" for the US' prosperity compared to LatAm is that occupation in the north was exstinguishing of native populations, while in the south it was merging. Indigenious people have no influence on the character of the US today, while they do have one on countries from Argentina to Mexico. The Brits would have had to exstinguish all the Indios.

Read Max Tegmark of UPenn on the various ways in which multiple universes might be realized (link below). These include quantum branching and, what is weirder to contemplate, duplicates of and variations on our own world in this physical universe. (The latter possibility arises out of the elementary axioms of probability. Because the physical universe is so vast, one literally runs out of possible quantum states that a) involve the number of particles that make up our world, and b) are different from our world.)

This implication is that, somewhere, Columbus did sail for England. I find this line of reasoning to be an aesthetically appealing application of Okham's razor. One doesn't have to explain why a given historical outcome happened, rather than another that looks equally likely. Somewhere, somplace, EVERYTHING happens.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302131

Connie Willis in "To Say Nothing of the Dog" portrays the idea of randomness vs. fate of history in a very comical way. It invovles one Oxford don pushing another into the Thames.

I was briefly enamored of the notion that everything that can occur, does occur somewhere, but in retrospect it made no sense. If it were true, in any given alternate universe, future probabilities will be evenly distributed. That is, even if the probability of a dinosaur-killer asteroid striking the earth today is one in 30 billion, you will have one universe where it does happen, and one where it doesn't. As such, if you randomly select a given universe today, you will have a 50% chance of ending up one where a big rock just hit. If all possibilities happen, it follows that you have an equal probability of ending up in any possible universe.

Now, consider that you could also break such events down to the microsecond, and compound them with the possibility of a universe where you win the lottery at the same second that the rock lands, and the rationality of such a multiverse goes out the window.

I tried to get my head around this by saying that certain universes were still less likely, but that didn't work. "Likely" is a meaningless term if something is necessarily going to happen.

Anyway, it has been a long time since "accidents of history" scared me. Hell, considering the blind luck behind the conception of any human being, any event in history where an individual or a couple of individuals played a decisive role is essentially random. But for some reason, no one ever asks "What if Hitler's dad had climaxed just one second later on the night of his conception?"

Wait... I think I see what you mean. In other words, if a butterfly flaps its wings confusedly in Palm Beach, it could completely change future events in, say, Venezuela?

DeLong, I think you're onto something.

Remember, had Columbus sailed for England, he would not have been able to use the Canary islands as his starting-off point. He would likely have been forced to take a far more northerly course. Given the winds, he probably would have landed in Bermuda or Virginia or somewhere like that. There would have been no Treaty of Tordesillas. I see a scenario where all of S. America could easily have ended up Portuguese. The Brazilian domination of soccer thus would have displaced the brits decades earlier. More Ronaldinhos, fewer Beckhams, a big plus for the world in my book.

Dinsky, I would keep in mind the fact that the parts of America settled by the British had much smaller populations than Mexico and South America. With some notable exceptions (such as Cahokia, which IIRC was abandoned before Europeans found it), the peoples of the north were hunter-gatherer types.

Also, don't forget that the Spanish wiped out the relatively small population of Hispaniola. If the British had settled in the south and the Spanish in the north, I wouldn't be surprised to see merged societies speaking English at least as a second language in the south and a largely homogeneous Spanish-speaking society in the north.

Would England have been as commercially strong as it was if it had gotten to South America's metallic wealth instead of Spain? Dependency on plunder tends to wither a society's commercial instinct.

Also, such a vast and rapid infusion of plunder can feed the megalomania of monarchs. Would there have been a Spanish attempt to invade England without American wealth? And how would such wealth have altered Queen Elizabeth's foreign policy?

The British got the cod of the Grand Banks, and the Spanish got the gold and silver of Mexico and Bolivia and Peru. Then the Spanish sold the gold and silver to the British for cod.
It could have gone the other way...

M.: Did you misunderstand my post? I said exactly the same. So I will keep it in mind ;) To continue the argument: If Columbus had started from England, South America (maybe "Anglo-Saxon America?") would be just as poor, while North America would be as rich. The rationale is that it is much easier for immigrated peoples to reach the economic level of their country of origin than for indigenious peoples to become "matured". So, IMHO, looking for reasons s.a. ressource richness, rule of law, democracy or even access to the Ocean (this sounds more probable) pale in contrast to inherited culture.

And... and what if primates hadn't produced a sentient species, but proboscidea had? Then... our keyboards would probably be more like circles or squares than rectangles, so that we could type with only one trunk, rather than with two hands!

[Grown males would live by themselves in the forest, uncommunicative, coming into the herd only to mate. Scientists would speculate on whether they could ever learn to communicate at a female level...]

I don't find the application of chaos theory to history (& thus contemporary politics) a problem. It suggests that as individuals we can have an influence (altho' the nature of chaos means we have a little better than even chance it will be in the direction we want). If I pass a comment here it is possible somebody will remember it when advice is being given on national policy thus leading to a marginal improvement & eventually political strength of the country - China.

Chaos theory only works up to the limit of the system. No matter where Columbus sails from South America remains nearer Spain than England.

"I was briefly enamored of the notion that everything that can occur, does occur somewhere, but in retrospect it made no sense. If it were true, in any given alternate universe, future probabilities will be evenly distributed. That is, even if the probability of a dinosaur-killer asteroid striking the earth today is one in 30 billion, you will have one universe where it does happen, and one where it doesn't."

Raskolnikov, you might look up "measure theory". If you're looking at infinitely many possible worlds, that perhaps differ continuously (one where Hitler's father climaxed one second later, another where it was half a second later, and a quarter second, etc) then saying they're all equally probable is like saying they all happen with probability approximately zero.

But you can treat them as something continuous, and think of areas or volumes of worlds. What's the probability of a world with a killer asteroid somewhere in the last million years? That might be 1% or bigger. And if you add up all the worlds with a killer asteroid in the last thousand years that might be .001%, and you're on your way.

Can anyone furnish a reference for the story of what happened between Henry VII and Bartholomew? Samuel Eliot Morison's history has it that Henry "turned him down flat." Bartholomew then went to France to petition Charles VIII and was still there when Isabella finally came across.
I'd appreciate a chance to track down this story. Hope it doesn't spoil the speculation. Thanks.

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