Abd al Rahman al Ghafiq was exhilarated. Allah had just favoured him with the most exalted victory over the infidel Franks in the heart of Europe. His Arab army, according to the eighth-century Mozarabic Chronicle, had remained “immobile as a wall” against the enemy’s advances and had held together “like a glacier”. Then, “In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Franks with the sword.”

The Muslim army, once again, was victorious, and in frenzied hand-to-hand fighting the Frankish leader was hacked down and beheaded. His name was Charles, duke and prince of the Franks. A few hours later one of his senior commanders presented the governor with his blood-smeared trophy. He nodded with satisfaction. “Praise to God. It is done.”

There could be no doubt that God was on the Muslims’ side. Ever since the Prophet Mohammed had first unified the squabbling pagan tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam, the new faith and its warriors had never looked back. Mohammed had died in 632, a century before the Battle of Tours, and the procession of victories had begun immediately after his death.

In 634 Damascus had fallen, and three years later the hoary old Patriarch of Jerusalem surrendered the Holy City to the Muslim caliph Umar, and by 641 Byzantine Egypt had folded. In 651, Yazdgird III, Persian King of Kings, was killed at Merv in Turkmenistan and the once mighty Sasanian Empire had been toppled. The Byzantines were flattened, too. Out of nowhere the Islamic Empire was rampant and resplendent — but there was more, much more, to come.

From the 670s, Muslim armies fanned across North Africa and swathes of Central Asia. In 711, the Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with Muslim forces and landed on the Iberian Peninsula. Within five years the majority of it acknowledged Muslim authority. Coins were issued with a Latin inscription proclaiming the Islamic creed, modelled on Byzantine issues in North Africa: In nomine Dei Non Deus Nisi Deus Solus Non Deus Alius. In the Name of God, There is no God but God.

The Muslim victory at Tours was a turning-point. Had the Christians prevailed at the battle, the 14th-century Egyptian historian Maqrizi imagined, an Arabian fleet might never have sailed unchallenged into the Thames. “Perhaps the interpretation of the Bible, not the Quran, would still be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a God-fearing people the sanctity and truth of the Holy Trinity,” he wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Infidels.

Tours was no one-off raid on the Franks — it marked instead the beginning of Islamic consolidation and expansion in western Europe. For the Iberian Peninsula that the Arabs had travelled through to fight at Tours, the consequences were profound. Starting in the eighth century, droves of Christians converted to the new faith and the sound of church bells tolling became a thing of the past. Jews remained a tolerated minority for centuries to come; they were not hounded out of the Peninsula by the resurgent kingdoms of Castile, Léon, Navarre and Aragón because there was no Reconquista, and there was no Spain. The formerly Christian Hispania of Romans and Visigoths remained proudly Muslim Al Andalus.

The messenger sent to bring the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al Malik the stirring news of the victory at Tours failed to find the leader of the Islamic world in his palace in Damascus. He was instead besporting himself in his vast desert palace-fortress of Qasr al Hayr al Sharqi, near Palmyra, where he loved to hunt, listen to music, drink copious bumpers of red wine and seek pleasure in the arms of his concubines. The caliph appeared unimpressed by the Muslim triumph almost three thousand miles to the west.

“It is well,” he said, waving the messenger away. “Let them continue north.”

They followed his command and did just that. After Tours, the Umayyad army under Abd al Rahman al Ghafiq, swelled by defectors, pressed north and east. Over successive  generations, Muslim armies continued the jihad. Many Christians converted at the point of a sword, many more — together with growing numbers of Jews — took up the faith voluntarily.

Suggested reading

The greatest stories never told

By Peter Franklin

Born a decade after Tours, Charles’s grandson Charlemagne grew up in its shadow. As king of the Franks from 771, his energies were consumed not so much by imperial and religious expansion — uniting all the Germanic peoples into one kingdom and converting his subjects to Christianity — but in desperate attempts to resist the mighty Islamic wave crashing over western Christendom. Exalted in his aims, however, he was unsuccessful on the battlefield.

He lived just long enough to see Paris fall to Muslim forces. A year later, in 814, the self-styled Emperor of the Romans died, plunging his embattled kingdom — and much of Europe — into internecine strife, energetically stoked by Umayyad leaders. Bruges fell in 847. By 900 Rome, Genoa, Milan, Florence and Venice had either fallen to the Muslims after fighting or had surrendered voluntarily to avoid further bloodshed. Puppet popes, shorn of real power, henceforth were the order of the day.

There was no Carolingian Renaissance to illuminate the continent. Instead that role fell to those fortune-seeking Muslim scholars who followed in the wake of the Arab warriors. After their lightning campaigns across the continent, the great European monasteries, formerly illustrious centres of learning, were either torched or converted to Islamic madrassas, colleges where students learned the sacred truths of the Quran and fikh, Islamic jurisprudence.

Arab science, medicine and mathematics broke new ground in Muslim Europe. Beginning in the tenth century, Rome, once the fortress of western Christendom, emerged as a powerhouse of Islamic philosophy, law, astronomy, history, geography, cartography and calligraphy. Scholars from as far afield as Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad flocked there to find imperial patronage, translating some of the great works of classical Greek, Hindu and Persian scholarship into Arabic. Seminal works by Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates, Galen and others found their way onto the bookshelves of generations of Umayyad Muslim emirs (princes) in their Roman palaces.

Suggested reading

History began with a counterfactual

By Tom Holland

Portraiture became virtually unknown in Europe. Learned scholars spoke mysteriously of ancient Persian miniatures depicting images of men, women and animals, but these were frowned upon as the impious works of artists who had lost their way and departed from the true faith. Sculpture died out completely and, led by the Arabs, artistic life focused on architecture, calligraphy, mosaics, pottery, embroidery and carpet-weaving.

Over several centuries, Umayyad power expanded across Europe. Christendom found itself increasingly hemmed in and hard-pressed within the southeastern rump of the continent, harried by ever more damaging Ottoman incursions. Christians no longer looked to compromised Rome for spiritual leadership and salvation, but east to Constantinople, last independent bastion of the faith. There were no Crusades in the Middle East because there were no Christian armies left to fight them.

Then, in 1453, calamity struck. Constantinople had resisted foreign invaders for more than 1,000 years. The long line of would-be conquerors included Attila the Hun (447), the Avars (626), the Umayyad caliph Muawiya (674–678) and the Russians (860). But on 29 May, the 21-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II finally succeeded where all before him had failed. The Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, “Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans”, to give him his official title, was killed and beheaded in a frantic defence of eastern Christendom’s millennial headquarters.

Orthodox Constantinople, “City of the World’s Desire”, became Muslim Istanbul. The Balkans, much of which had already been conquered, were completely overrun. From one end of the continent to the other, the Muslim crescent, rather than the Christian cross, now dominated the skyline.

Suggested reading

The glorious reign of King Henry IX

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Those who had prayed that peace and prosperity might finally flow from a united Sunni Muslim Europe soon discovered that their hopes and dreams had been illusory. True, there were no sectarian wars pitting Catholics against Protestants, but far worse was to follow.

Arabs and Ottomans may both have been Muslim, but that was all that bound them together. During the Forty Years War, which began in 1460, Arab armies fought repeated campaigns against the Ottomans as Islamic Europe tore itself apart. Muslims, alongside those Jews and Christians who had chosen to retain their faiths and remained dhimmi protected persons in return for payment of the jizya capitation tax, watched aghast as the continent immiserated itself.

There was no Reformation and there was no Renaissance. Western Europe had been gobbled up by Arab Muslim armies, Eastern Europe had succumbed to Ottoman steel and artillery and now the two Muslim forces battled it out for supremacy. For many Europeans, whatever their religion, it seemed as though the Dark Ages had returned.

Justin Marozzi is the author of Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization, published by Penguin.

King John is reluctant to accept the idea that the monarch should be subject to the rule of law, and he believes God — at least in the form of Pope Innocent — is on his side. But John is at an impasse. He cannot defeat the barons, who now hold London. And Pope Innocent is far away.

The worst clause in Magna Carta, from John’s perspective, is the one which gives authority to 24 Barons to adjudicate disputes, and overrule the king if they believe he is breaking the law — known to us as “Security Clause”, or Clause 61. So, John pulls off one last trick: he attaches his seal to the document before the barons have chosen their 24 names. The chance to name them in writing is gone, and by the time John’s son Henry III re-issues Magna Carta in November 1216, after his father’s death, that crucial clause is gone. Yes: the king is subject to the law in theory. But there is no mechanism to enforce that law.

Despite its flaws, we British love Magna Carta. But what if John, who reignited the civil war by trying to flout its restrictions almost immediately, had never agreed to it?

The barons hated their king. The medieval chronicler Matthew Paris gave a good sense of the esteem in which the monarch was held when he wrote upon his death in October 1216: “Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of John.” John’s greatest predilections were for arbitrary justice and punitive taxation, much of which might have been forgiven if he hadn’t also had a remarkable ability to lose the expensive wars on which he embarked.

He lost all the territory in France that his father, Henry II, had conquered, and when he attempted to retake those lands in the Anglo-French War of 1213-14, he was comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Bouvines in July 1214. The barons, who had been taxed through the nose to pay for this war, were furious. It is hard to overstate their determination to bring the king under the rule of law.

To do so they forged allegiances with Alexander II, King of Scotland, and Llewelyn the Great, the Welsh Prince, and both rulers took up arms against John — despite the fact that each was married to one of his daughters.

Suggested reading

The greatest stories never told

By Peter Franklin

If John had refused to agree to Magna Carta, the rebellion would have continued, and the determination to shift the balance of power against the monarch would have deepened still further. John had castles, and armies — largely of French mercenaries — but with Alexander to the north, and Llewelyn to the west, he was in trouble. Llewelyn’s wife Joan had already told her father in 1212 that he was likely to be killed by the Welsh if he tried to take their lands. So it is not hard to imagine the assassination, or death in battle, of the king, if the war had continued.

You might argue that, given John died of dysentery the following year anyway, history would have plotted a very similar course. Prior to his death, half the barons had turned to Prince Louis of France as an alternate monarch, and invited him to invade, which he did. When John died, allegiances shifted to Prince Henry, John’s nine-year old son, as he looked easier to control than an ambitious French prince. In the end Louis had to be bribed to give up his claim and go home, becoming King Louis VIII of France the following decade.

But without a legal declaration of Magna Carta, I believe history would have played out very differently. The terms of peace treaties are settled by power. With John dead and only a boy prince to turn to, the barons would never have dropped their demand for that crucial legal power: the right to overrule the king. This would have made us unique across Europe, effectively giving us a constitutional monarchy 400 years early.

First: this would have put us at odds with the most powerful man in Europe, Pope Innocent III. Innocent issued a papal bull annulling even the watered-down Magna Carta: he condemned it as “illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people”, and declared it “null, and void of all validity for ever”. He would have been horrified by the complete version — as would Prince Louis, who I doubt would have taken up the invitation to invade if it had come at such a cost.

As Henry VIII discovered 300 years later, disagreeing with the Pope is rather a slippery slope. If he’s wrong, why agree with anything inconvenient about the hegemony of the Catholic church? Why have a king at all, even one you can control, if you can just agree the laws among yourselves?

Suggested reading

The glorious reign of King Henry IX

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Those 24 barons could have formed a different way of running the state — similar, perhaps to the system developed by the Swiss Confederacy a hundred or so years later. An oligarchy of the great families, each with their own dominion, and an Extra-Magna Carta to take the rule of law to an even higher level. Llewelyn and Alexander might have joined as equals, or partners. Instead of the nation of England dominating these islands, we might have seen England fragment to a loose alliance between micro-nations like Northumbria, Cornwall, Mercia and Yorkshire, living largely peaceably with the other small nations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

If that sounds outlandish, remember that most of Europe was made of tiny states for the first 800 years of the last millennium. Of course, the Holy Roman Empire brought many nations — including the Swiss confederacy — under its orbit, but the countries it comprised still existed, and were small. A confederated realm of German princedoms existed until 1871, when it united as a nation-state. The unification of Italy’s city-states and princedoms was completed in 1861. France consolidated earlier, but its territorial history remains immensely complex, including unification with Brittany, Burgundy and Savoy, and various degrees of autonomy in more remote regions. England didn’t have to be England.

Suggested reading

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

Would the British confederacy have been as ambitious in its colonial ambitions? It seems unlikely. The baronial oligarchy would have been established as a direct result of failed attempts at territorial expansion in France; it seems likely they would have given up on expensive wars at least for a time, not least because any attempt to take their pioneering system of government across the channel might have brought papal authority down upon them. Simply defending their shores, and ironing out the inevitable inter-baronial disputes, would have been the priority.

In our national myth, we think of England as manifest destiny: it’s there in the Arthurian legend. The formation of Albion, as John Hurt endlessly intoned in BBC adaptation of Merlin a decade ago. It’s King Alfred’s tireless goal in the Last Kingdom series, adapted from Bernard Cornwell’s novels about a Viking warrior who fights alongside the West Saxon king.

But the reality is that England is too big for these islands. Its size is what makes the Union impossible. England has about 56 million inhabitants, 84% of the UK’s population, and 78% of all those living in the British Isles, including the Republic of Ireland. We cannot have an English Parliament, because it would so absurdly dominate the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish equivalents. And that leaves the English with a sense of national identity that has been sold in myth and legend for 800 years, but no government of their own.

If the British confederacy had been founded back in 1215, it might have unified like Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century. But it would have been a partnership of many equals, instead of a single giant state setting out to dominate its smaller neighbours. England might not be England. But, unlike our current, fracturing union, my hypothetical Union of the British Isles might have a chance of remaining united. It might even have stayed in the European Union.

As Britain industrialised during the 19^th century, work increasingly happened outside the home. This in turn split the roles of men and women. Whereas a pre-industrial England household might combine subsistence farming with artisan trades, with both men and women working, industrialisation made it much more difficult to combine out-of-home work with the care of dependent children. Thus what had once been the situation for only the wealthiest women became a new aspirational standard: a “cult of domesticity” in which women did not work but rather were responsible for “higher” moral and emotional values.

The evangelical writer Thomas Gisborne’s 1797 An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex sums up this moral framework. The duty of women, he wrote, is “to give delight in the affectionate intercourse of domestic society;…to smooth the bed of sickness…and to promote useful institutions…for the instruction of children”. And the place of women is in the home.

As Gisborne puts it:

“Home is the centre round which the influence of every married woman is accumulated. It is there that she will naturally be known and respected the most; it is there, at least, that she may be more known and more respected than she can be in any other place.”

Wives who “had to go out to work” were a source of shame in this new society of “separate spheres”. But as the 19^th century wore on, this moral framework faced a new, double threat. On the one hand groups such as the Langham Place Circle began to campaign for women’s entry into academia and professional life. On the other, industrialists — whose factories had been instrumental in creating the split between home and work in the first place — began to see the advantage of hiring women.

By the beginning of the 20^th century British industry was increasingly worried by manufacturing competition from overseas, and this was exacerbated by another downward pressure on manufacturing profits: the emerging trade union movement. In a manufacturing world where many jobs were highly skilled, striking workers couldn’t easily be replaced. Those workers began to use their power.

Privately, leaders of industry identified women as a solution to both problems. Because for the most part women only worked until they got married, you could pay them less, as unmarried women did not have families to support.

Women were less physically strong than men, but they would tolerate repetitive and dull work for the shorter duration of their working lives. So manufacturing jobs could be broken down into less demanding tasks — “diluted” — for female employees, making processes more efficient and lowering costs. This change also weakened male labour unions, by sharpening wage competition as well as reducing the bargaining power of skilled workers.

More from this series

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

Here the economic interests of the industrialists aligned with those of a growing chorus of women. Being “Angel of the House” was all very well if your husband was both well-paid and inclined to pass his earnings on to his wife and children. But it was less idyllic for those women married to men whose work was sporadic, or to men who gambled or drank their salaries and left their families to go hungry. Such women joined the more middle-class feminist campaigns for women’s education and voting rights, calling for equal pay for equal work.

When war broke out in 1914, the twin drive by feminists and industrialists for women’s greater access to the workplace was accelerated by the disappearance of much of the male workforce into military service. In July 1914, 3.3 million women worked in paid employment in Britain; by 1917, 4.7 million women worked, a jump from 24% of the total workforce to 37%.

It was in this context that feminist Eleanor Rathbone wrote her 1917 essay On the Remuneration of Women. Rathbone foresaw the rise in women working during the war as a potential threat to the wellbeing of women and children throughout the country.

The main beneficiaries of women’s employment in manufacturing, she argued, would be industrialists. These individuals could boost their profits by hiring young women on a rapid-turnover basis, rather than highly skilled men on a long-term permanent basis. But this change ran counter to the interests of both men (most of whom had families to support) and also the non-working women — which in practice usually meant married mothers — who relied on these men’s salaries. Rathbone foresaw a looming post-war conflict between employers keen to save money by hiring unmarried women, and the trade unions keen to protect their male members’ careers.

A second wartime phenomenon was the “separation allowance” paid by the Government to non-working wives of serving soldiers to ensure dependent women and children were not left to starve in their husbands’ absence. Rathbone identified the separation allowance as a model for solving these impending conflicts.

She argued that the work of rearing and caring for the next generation was of such profound national importance that women should be supported by the government for doing it. The separation allowance was in effect a government payment to women for motherhood, and Rathbone suggested that such an allowance should be extended beyond wartime, for all married mothers. This, she argued, would not only acknowledge the value of motherhood but also provide women with an incentive to focus on family life instead of on a wage competition with men that degraded employment conditions for everyone.

More from this series

The glorious reign of King Henry IX

By Susannah Lipscomb

Rathbone’s arguments initially fell on deaf ears; returning soldiers got their jobs back, by and large, and most women left manufacturing. But the stigma on factory work had been broken. In 1923, a government enquiry investigated the now acute shortage of domestic servants. The committee reported that it was driven by the growing availability and “respectability” of manufacturing work: girls no longer sought work as housemaids but on assembly lines. This revelation, combined with a wave of strikes across the North-West over “female blacklegs”, prompted action by newly-elected Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Baldwin was under pressure on many fronts. With cheaper imported goods driving down prices and profits, manufacturers were laying off workers, and Baldwin faced calls for a return to protectionist tariffs to defend British industry. After meeting Rathbone through her key role negotiating women’s partial inclusion in the 1918 Representation of the People Act, he took a different approach. Baldwin’s 1923 Mothers’ Allowance Bill used the separation allowance as a model for a universal payment to married or widowed mothers with dependent children.

In private letters, Baldwin acknowledged his calculation that the Mothers’ Allowance would serve in part as a subsidy on the wages of married men, thus enabling manufacturers to keep wages lower. His gamble worked. Wages dropped, male employment rose, prices remained low and foreign imports lost competitiveness. Baldwin evaded a fight within the Conservative Party on tariffs that he feared he would not win.

The policy was wildly popular across the electorate, playing well with both conservative sensibilities on the proper roles of men and women, but also with newly-enfranchised women voters. Feminists argued that this remuneration for motherhood represented recognition for the first time of women’s “different but equal” contribution to the national interest.

This was reinforced when Baldwin rapidly followed the Mothers’ Allowance legislation with a second Bill enfranchising women on an equal basis with men. In his speech welcoming the Representation of Women Act (1924), Baldwin stated that “The work of women in the family and household, while different to that of men, carries equal weight and is of equal national value. We have now corrected a longstanding injustice that weighed women as lesser in the scales to men.”

Not all feminists were supportive. Millicent Fawcett criticised the 1924 Act as a sop thrown to women to offset “the permanent thwarting of women’s aspirations to higher employment or public life”, ensuring that instead women would be “locked forever in a gilded domestic cage, bought and paid by Mr Baldwin’s forty pieces of silver”. She was mocked at the time for decrying the very franchise she had long campaigned for, with what the Spectator called “the gracelessness we’ve come to expect from that most graceless of creatures, the Feminist”.

But Fawcett was in a minority. The entitlement was taken up near-universally, and by the mid-1930s less than 2% of married British women were in paid employment; one consequence was that voluntary work blossomed and charitable and educational endeavours of every kind filled all strata of society.

More from this series

The greatest stories never told

By Peter Franklin

The change also drove a backlash against the “loose” morals perceived to have flourished during the war years: taboos rapidly emerged against behaviour by mothers that could be understood as abusing Mothers’ Allowance. The 1930s saw a tightening in public morals, with growing social stigma against child neglect, idleness, pre-marital sex and unmarried “fraternising” in general. The culture of “anything goes” America, with its jazz clubs and rising hemlines, became a watchword for degeneracy, as did what one commentator called the “inhuman sex egalitarianism” of the Soviet Union.

The Mothers’ Union became immensely influential, with representatives in some areas of Britain gaining the power almost of parallel MPs. The Mothers’ Movement founded in America by Elizabeth Dilling was heavily shaped by its work. As the clouds of conflict gathered across Europe, the Mothers’ Union in Britain and Mothers’ Movement in the United States campaigned successfully against joining the war, arguing that the principal enemy was communism. Eventually a treaty was brokered with German leader Adolf Hitler — perhaps ironically, with fierce opposition from Eleanor Rathbone, now an MP for the Combined English Universities — that evaded the need for subsequent conflict.

Some historians have argued that the British women’s pacifist campaign of the 1930s was motivated less by opposition to the horrors of war as such than a fear that the immense cost of war would threaten the Mothers’ Allowance. Certainly it is likely that had Britain entered the war when Germany annexed Poland in 1939, the situation could have escalated, risking a global conflict whose costs might well have compromised the wealth and stability of the British Empire.

Some again have argued that joining the conflict would have been the right thing to do, especially considering information that came to light about the horrors committed in Greater Germany under Mr Hitler, following his assassination in 1951. But that is not how history unfolded. Instead, Britain watched while Germany and Russia wore out their territorial ambitions against one another, in a horrific conflict that cost millions of lives and which saw the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union — decades before the much-delayed fall of the British Empire.

The story of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble is fascinating, dramatic and intriguing. It also offers a wonderful counterfactual. What if the bubble hadn’t burst? What if Law’s gamble with the finances of 1720s France had paid off? With a few tweaks in the course of events, it’s just possible to imagine a world where the French didn’t rebel against their king, where Britannia didn’t rule the waves, and where the United States of America was never founded.

Law was born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a banker. Having learned the family trade, like many clever, educated Scots he then left the country seeking advantage elsewhere. In the first instance, that meant London. But after a row about a woman, he fought Edward Wilson in an (illegal) duel in 1694 and killed him with a single thrust of his rapier.

Imprisoned, he escaped and fled to the Continent, where his story really begins. Flitting between Amsterdam and Paris for almost twenty years, Law established himself as an early economist and advocate of financial innovation, as well as a fixture in aristocratic circles where his charm and intellect were highly prized. His greatest argument was that states should move away from money based on precious metal and instead adopt paper currencies based on government debt. By increasing the amount of money in circulation, Law reckoned, rulers could allow traders and investors to do more business, make more money and so pay more taxes.

That was a fanciful notion until 1715. That year, King Louis XIV of France died, leaving behind a country impoverished by years of his profligate spending and foreign wars and ruled by a child, five-year-old Louis XV. His regent was the Duke of Orleans, an acquaintance of Law.

Law persuaded Orleans to let him establish the Banque Générale, which was permitted to issue paper notes backed by gold and silver. It worked, so Law upped the stakes and bet again. He convinced Orleans to let him go global, and the result was the Company of the West, France’s first joint stock company. It controlled trade between France and its holdings in North America, a huge territory along 3,000 miles of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Quebec.

This wasn’t really new, of course. Britain had established joint stock companies in the previous century and the Bank of England, set up after the Glorious Revolution, had been printing paper money for 20 years by then. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch had long-established companies controlling their foreign dominions.

So Law’s innovations allowed a poor and backward France to begin catching up with the global leaders. And for a time afterwards, it looked like it might even overtake them.

Law sold shares in the Company of the West, and the French appetite for them was insatiable. The profits of early colonial settlements, rumours of gold and silver deposits in American soil and Law’s charisma combined to create a feeding frenzy.   Demand drove prices up and up. Shares worth 500 livres at the start of 1719 were worth 10,000 by the year’s end.

Suggested reading

The glorious reign of King Henry IX

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Shareholders became hugely rich, at least on paper. The word “millionaire” was coined for those who achieved great wealth from the Mississippi company.

Orleans was delighted, because Law insisted shares could only be bought with outstanding French government loan notes: people piling into the company shares were effectively helping to pay off the crippling national debt.

So delighted that he granted Law first control over all France’s foreign conquests and trade, and then effective command of the French economy. First his bank was taken over by the crown, which guaranteed its paper currency, though Law remained in control of what was effectively the country’s first central bank. Then in January 1720, Law became the Controller-General and Superintendent-General of Finance.

Law’s historic error was to use his bank — renamed the Banque Royale —  to create too much new paper money to allow people to buy yet more shares in the Company of the West. The paper gains created by ever-rising share prices naturally persuaded some investors to seek to cash in by selling shares and convert their gains into gold.

As share prices began to fall in early 1721, the sell-off accelerated. Neither Law’s bank nor the French crown had enough gold to cover the sales, of course, so Law doubled down again. He banned payments in gold of more than 100 livres and made the paper notes issued by his bank legal tender; his hope was to persuade the French to accept paper instead of gold and it was briefly successful as shareholders did indeed exchange notes for shares.

What followed, of course, was rampant inflation. Law’s last gamble was to devalue his notes by 50%, a policy that saw him dismissed from his post and eventually forced to flee France. Shares in what was generally known as the Mississippi Company, meanwhile, fell back to their original value of 500 livres, wiping out the wealth of the millionaires and many others.

The consequences of the Mississippi Bubble were vast. The financial pain experienced by many of the French helped turn the country firmly against paper money and other suspiciously complex financial novelties: it would be 80 years before the country accepted another paper currency.

Suggested reading

The greatest stories never told

By Peter Franklin

Notably, the French response to a bursting bubble was very different to the British reaction to similar events. For, at around the same time as Law was at work in France, Britain was experiencing the better-known South Sea Bubble, a scheme partly inspired by Law’s apparent early success.

However that financial disaster persuaded the British to strengthen the Bank of England to control the money supply and allow the country to use paper money with confidence. The BoE’s new power helped Britain to borrow at low rates and finance both global military expansion and domestic industry: Rule, Britannia! was written in 1745, celebrating imperial power based on sound finance. These are the foundations of London as a global financial centre.

France, by contrast, stuck to gold and stagnated. Unable to raise capital, French industry struggled and the economy failed to develop. The monarchy was likewise short of cash, able to raise money only by imposing ever higher taxes on people ever less able to pay. The national trauma of the Mississippi Bubble also shattered public trust and confidence in the crown; bursting the bubble cost French rulers not just money but authority.

In 1763, the Seven Years War ended with France humiliated and broke. Louisiana east of the Mississippi river went to Great Britain; Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans went to Spain. Defeated on land by Robert Clive and its navy shattered, France abandoned any claim to India, clearing the way for what would become the British Raj.

The following decade, France backed the American revolutionaries challenging British rule in America, in the hope of denting its rival’s global domination. But the cost of that successful effort was the final straw for the Ancien Régime, helping to bring about revolution in 1789.  In due course, French leadership fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, who ended French claims in North America by agreeing the Louisiana Land Purchase with Thomas Jefferson.

All of this, the founding of our modern world, can be partly traced back to that bitter French experience of financial engineering. So what if Law had avoided inflating and bursting his bubble? What if he had resisted the temptation to print more money to fund more share purchases? There’s an important distinction to be drawn between Mississippi and the South Sea Bubble. The British scheme was fraudulent but Law was genuinely trying to improve France’s finances and economy. His failure was not inevitable.

Let’s say Law had found a way to stabilise the Mississippi share price without disaster. France in the 1720s would have had the basic elements of a modern capitalist economy: paper money and joint-stock companies. Such a nation would very likely have been a more effective rival to Great Britain during the 18th Century. A better-equipped and funded French military might well have secured a stalemate in India; Britain’s empire would have been a very different, and smaller, affair.

A more even outcome to the Seven Years War might well have seen France keep at least some of its Louisiana territories. Perhaps the same forces that brought about the American War of Independence against Britain would also have triggered an uprising against France there too. But with the two countries united by the desire to maintain control over their American colonies, would the rebels have succeeded?

Suggested reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

In our universe, French support for the revolution helped bring about the birth of the USA.  In the world where John Law’s gamble paid off, the French would have been colonial powers in North America alongside the British, and unlikely to support revolutionary forces there. Similarly, while the removal of the French threat in 1763 fed support for American independence, in a world where the hated rival still fields troops across the frontier the colonists’ desire for separaton would is far more limited.

It seems likely that both the British and French American colonies would still eventually gain their independence, but not as a single, continent-straddling republic and eventual superpower.

Meanwhile, a French domestic population enjoying greater economic growth and international success would have less reason to rise up against the monarchy in 1789, though doubtless the idea of absolute monarchy would still have crumbled eventually. A French revolution in the mid 19th Century, perhaps in 1848?

And in this alternative history, Napoleon Boneparte would still rise to prominence, albeit as the general commanding Royal French forces in a prolonged war with Britain in the early 19th Century. Who would have won those wars? If John Law’s gamble had paid off, it would be hard to bet against France.

If the Mississippi Bubble had not burst, today half the world would speak French, Paris would be a financial powerhouse, and the Gare du Nord would be the Gare du Waterloo, named in honour of the military victory that secured France’s place as the world’s first superpower.

But their non-historicity being the case, what’s the point of writing about them?

If history teaches us anything it’s that we should expect the unexpected. But history, unlike the news, is something that’s already happened. Historians, unlike journalists, see events in the rearview mirror. As a result, they’re rather prone to deterministic explanations. For instance, there’s the Whig view of history with its narratives of ever-increasing freedom. Marxists, meanwhile, situate historical events within an overarching process of class struggle. Indeed, from millenarians to environmentalists to the friends and foes of the Anglosphere, everyone’s trying to bend the arc of history.

Further reading

The myth of ‘Anglo-America’

By Peter Franklin

They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. That’s not just because of the dodgy interpretations they put on historical events, but also the significance they attach to them. Even if a particular development is accurately interpreted, it doesn’t lend much credence to your favoured narrative if it could have easily gone another way. 

Just because we can be certain that something did happen it doesn’t mean that it had to happen. And that’s why alt history is so valuable. If we accept that the past could have followed a different path, then perhaps we won’t be quite so blasé about the future.

The historian E.H. Carr was was not a fan of alt history:

“…one can always play a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history.”

Of course, being a Marxist, he would say that, wouldn’t he? An ideologically-trammelled thought process is pre-determined by where it starts from. The same, however, cannot be said for what happens outside our heads. That’s why Carr’s contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, believed that one can’t fully understand a period of history without considering all the other ways it might have turned out.

For instance, why didn’t the Roman Empire conquer the German lands beyond the Rhine? A determinist might reach for some geographical explanation — the territory was inhospitable and the locals scary. And yet similar obstacles didn’t stop the the Romans from assimilating Britannia, so why not Germania too?

Well, because three Roman legions were wiped out at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, that’s why — and there was nothing pre-determined about that catastrophe. It required the mother of all ambushes, made possible by the extreme cunning of the German chieftain Arminius and the extreme gullibility of the Roman commander Varus. It could easily not have happened – and thus, untraumatised by such an unexpected and total defeat, the Romans might have extended the northern frontier to the Elbe or beyond.

What would a Romanised Germania have meant for the rest of history? It’s impossible to say, but we can imagine an unRomanised Gaul. The existence of France (and the French language) as we know it today depends on the fact that, two thousand years ago, the Romans conquered Gaul, but not Germania. Had things gone differently, French (and therefore British and therefore American) history would have developed along a very different path.

Further reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

What this example also tells us is just how much of history depends on the character, abilities and decisions of particular individuals (contrast the ruthless brilliance of Julius Caesar in the case of Gaul with the trusting foolishness of Varus in the case of Germania). There’s something called the great man theory of history. It’s was a 19th Century idea and deeply unfashionable today, but while the individuals who change the course of history aren’t necessarily ‘great’ or, indeed, men — there’s no doubting their existence.

They don’t have to be heroes or villains. In fact, they don’t have to have much authority of any kind. Their impact doesn’t even have to be the result of a deliberate decision. They just have to do the right (wrong) thing in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. For instance, someone, somewhere, did something that introduced the Covid-19 virus to the human population. Whether that was eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory we’ll probably never know; but whatever it was, it made all the difference. 

That’s why we can’t leave alt history to the historians alone. While some of them might see merit in exploring counterfactuals, their commitment to academic rigour acts as a constraint upon their speculations. Quite right too, but there’s also a case for letting our imaginations run riot — and for that we need story-tellers.

*

The Plot Against America, is a critically acclaimed TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. The point of divergence from our actual history comes when the isolationist Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940. It’s a warning that no country is immune to tyranny. 

The rise to power of a populist celebrity has obvious contemporary resonances. Too obvious, perhaps. In drawing parallels we shouldn’t overlook differences. I also have my doubts about alt history as wish-fulfilment. Curtis Sittenfeld had a best-seller this year with her novel Rodham — which re-imagines Hillary Clinton’s life and career if she had never married Bill. Amazingly, it turns out that she does better (in politics) without him — which, for a politician so inept in real life that she lost an election to Donald Trump, is stretching credulity.

Another example of alt history as political therapy is Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). The novel’s setting is 1980s London. But in this version of history, Alan Turing has survived the homophobic persecution of 1950s and, as a result, the progress of technology has been greatly accelerated – with dramatic consequences. For instance, the Argentinians have AI-enhanced Exocet missiles and therefore win the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher is thus defeated at the next election — by, er, Tony Benn. (Imagine an alt history in which a left-wing writer manages to portray our first female Prime Minister without humiliating her.)

Further reading

Are humans heading for the knacker’s yard?

By Peter Franklin

McEwen also supposes that Turing would have created an artificial, but conscious, mind — and, furthermore, one housed within an artificial, but lifelike, human body. It’s true that Turing and his colleagues really did think that artificial intelligence was within reach; but, genius though he was, he turned out to be colossally wrong about that. A more insightful novel might have explored how — or if — he would have realised his error.

For an ‘alt technology’ novel that does convince, I’d recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). This one’s set in a late 20th century England where medical science has taken a different and disturbing turn. Individuals are cloned and their ‘offspring’ — in effect, their twin siblings — raised in secluded institutions. Eventually, in young adulthood, the clones make a series of compulsory ‘donations’ — the basis of medical treatment for their ‘models’. Just how science and society developed in this direction, we’re never really told. Ishiguro keeps most of the details from us — and what he does reveal comes slowly. In this way, the readers’ experience parallels that of the clones, whose story this is.

In its mannered intimacy, Ishiguro’s prose creates a world as confined and claustrophobic as that imposed upon the protagonists, but without ever hiding the entire universe contained within each and every human being. And thus we’re lead gently by the hand to the story’s devastating conclusion.

Ishiguro’s minimalist approach is one way to do alt history — the other is to go all out and show us events unfolding on an epic scale. Instead of describing one small corner of the altered world, we get the panoramic view. Indeed, we might see the consequences of a point of divergence playing out over decades or even centuries. I’ve previously written about Pavane by Keith Roberts in which the Catholic Church defeats the Reformation and goes on to deliberately slow down the pace of technological change — with justification, perhaps.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is set in a world in which the Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide America between them. But more than that, the author shows us parallel realities. There is, for instance, a story within the story — a banned book in which the Allies won the war — except not as they did in our timeline.

Further reading

Why we must suppress technological progress

By Peter Franklin

Then there’s the master of the maximalist approach — Harry Turtledove. In his novel How Few Remain (1997) a missing message from General Lee is recovered by the Confederacy (instead of falling into Union hands, as it did in reality). From that small change, the author develops — in lavish detail — a timeline that extends into the 1940s. It’s not just that the South wins the Civil War, but that the two sides (the Confederate States and the rump United States) go on to fight the First and Second World Wars on America soil. By the end of eleventh novel in the series, the North nukes the South and America is finally reunified, sort of.  

*

Fully fictional alt history can therefore go where scholarly investigation can’t. While there’s merit in examining the immediate consequences of a counterfactual, there’s only so far a serious historian can take the speculation. Once you get into second or third order effects, the mounting uncertainties overwhelm academic credibility. The novelist, though, can keep going — perhaps into the far future. 

This allows us to ask an important question, which is whether the underlying forces of history would eventually reassert themselves. Even if certain details were changed, with short-term consequences, would the world end up in much the same place over the longer-term? For the historical determinist the answer is yes. If ‘great men’ like Julius Caesar or Martin Luther had died in infancy, there’d have been other Caesars, other Luthers. As for wars, some of them could have gone the other way, but for how long would that truly matter? Consider the Wars of the Roses, for instance. How many of us today know — or care — which side won?

Further reading

Who do the English think they are?

By Razib Khan

But at this point we need to let science intrude upon the humanities. Chaos theory, for instance, teaches us that tiny differences in starting conditions can create hugely different outcomes. It’s a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect — so-called because, conceivably, the flap of butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could lead to a hurricane on the other. If that seems far fetched, then think about the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs. With the slightest change to its starting trajectory, it would have missed Earth and human history wouldn’t have happened at all. 

The determinists, therefore, have missed something rather big. While the passage of time may erase some events, others are magnified.

A Sound of Thunder is a short story by Ray Bradbury. It’s a sci-fi scenario in which big game hunters travel back in time to shoot dinosaurs. The trip organisers are very careful about not altering the past. For instance, the only animals that get shot are ones that were about to die anyway. Furthermore, the time travellers are told to stick to a special raised platform, so that  they don’t even leave footprints behind. But then on one trip, a hunter panics — he steps off the platform and crushes an insect. When he gets back home, he finds that his carelessness has changed the course history — and not for the better. A fascistic presidential candidate who was all set to lose the election is now the winner. Oops.

That crushed insect, by the way, was a butterfly. 

*

This then is what I think alt history teaches us about real history: not that it is without pattern or meaning, but that it is fragile.

The things that we may regard as progress or count as our achievements, hang by a thread — a sequence of events, anyone of which could have turned out differently.

That’s worth bearing in mind as we congratulate ourselves on our comforts and liberties. That they were gained at all was not inevitable — and nor is their survival.

Whether or not one sees the hand of providence at work in human history, we should never take what we’ve got for granted.

Further reading

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

Suggested reading

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

So, if you could snap your fingers and wish those years away, would you? I’m placing the decision entirely in your hands. There is a catch however. If you do decide to turn back time, you don’t get any younger. Nor do the people in your life. The dearly departed don’t come back, but on the other hand any children you might have aren’t erased. Rather, it’s the state of the world that goes back by two whole decades: politics, society, culture, technology — that sort of thing.

By the way, if you’re currently doing a job that didn’t exist at the Millennium, this is magicked into the nearest equivalent. Thus if you’re an Uber driver then you’d be working for a regular taxi firm instead. If you’re a journalist at a current affairs website, then you’d be working for the dead tree press. You get the idea. That said, I’m not sure what a social media ‘influencer’ would be doing in my scenario — but let’s pretend it’s something useful.

Anyway, for the purposes of this thought experiment, assume that your personal circumstances are more or less as they are now, it’s just the bigger picture that’s been reset to the 1st January, 2000.

With all that understood, do you still snap your fingers? I’d imagine those of an optimistic disposition definitely wouldn’t. Why wish away 20 years of progress? But the pessimists might ask: what progress?

At the start of the 21st century, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We hadn’t ploughed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, George W Bush had yet to be elected President. And even if the hanging chads were still to swing the same way, we shouldn’t forget that Dubya was elected on a foreign policy platform of non-interventionism. In re-setting history, there’s a chance that the hijacking plot would be foiled. Failing that, the response of the US (and UK) governments might not be to invade a country that had nothing to with 9/11.

Obviously, the Middle East featured a pretty horrible set of governments in 2000, but they’re still pretty horrible now. Certain groups — such as the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites — are less downtrodden, but other populations have been devastated by civil war and brutal persecution. Would things have been as bad had the Second Gulf War never happened?

However, I’m getting into the realms of alt-history here and my purpose is much simpler: to ask whether we’re better off now than in 2000.

Suggested reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

For most of the developing world, the answer is definitely yes. Across a range of issues, including poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy, there’s been real progress. It’s not all good, obviously — the blessings of development must be weighed against the curses, for instance traffic deaths and industrial pollution. But, on the whole, humanity (if not the natural world) is better off than it was 20 years ago. This is the strongest argument — indeed, an overwhelming one — for not hitting the reset button.

Okay, but what if the question was limited to the developed world? Just how good has the 21st century been for us in the UK and the West more generally.

Well, it’s certainly not all bad. Cancer survival rates have improved, for instance. Since the mid-1990s there’s been a long-term decline in crime, including violent crime. Indeed, young people in the 21st century are generally more sensible than previous generations at the same age, with lower levels of drug use and teenage pregnancy. The Post-Millennial generation appears to be especially cautious — almost to a fault. However, patterns do vary from country-to-country — with America’s multi-generational opioid epidemic and the rise in ‘deaths-of-despair’ casting a shadow over the last decade.

In many ways, western societies have become more tolerant over the last 20 years, with big shifts in social attitudes on issues like same sex marriage and associated changes in the law. But, again, there’s a countervailing tendency — support for populist political movements is now at a level that would have shocked us 20 years ago.

At the start of the 21st century, liberal internationalism was all but unchallenged. Bill Clinton was still President in the US, Tony Blair Prime Minister in the UK and Gerhard Schröder Chancellor in Germany. The Euro had been launched the previous year, but Greece wasn’t a member yet. In both Russia and China, those in charge were assumed to be reformist and well-disposed to us. The ex-Communist countries of central and eastern Europe were in the process of integrating with the West, and in the world as a whole globalisation was the order of the day. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, published in 1992, looked like a pretty good guide to the future.

Suggested reading

How to beat the politics of punishment

By Peter Franklin

But there were early signs of trouble: on 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned to be replaced by Vladimir Putin. Earlier that year, an obscure political party called UKIP won its first MEPs in the European Parliament, including a chap called Nigel Farage. The US presidential election of 2000 was unusually divisive, culminating in a bitterly polarising battle over the Florida result. 2000 also saw the dot-com crash — an advanced warning of the bubble-prone weakness of 21st-century capitalism.

However, the cracks in the system went unnoticed — not least due to the external shock of 9/11. And yet the warnings kept coming. In 2002, there was a major upset in the first round of the French Presidential election — when Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked-out the Socialist candidate to make it through to the run-off. He was then trounced by Jacques Chirac, but the result prefigured a new pattern for western politics — the rise of the populist Right and the decline of the centre-Left.

Pre-occupied with the Middle East and an economic boom back home, political establishments across the West didn’t see themselves as under threat. The Le Pen thing was written off as a French aberration. But then came disaster after disaster: The Iraq insurgency. The Afghan quagmire. The credit crunch. The banking crisis. The Great Recession. The Eurozone crisis. The Syrian civil war. The rise of ISIS. The refugee crisis. Brexit. Trump. Populist revolts in western Europe. Populist governments in the east.

This wasn’t just bad luck, but the result of errors of judgement and lapses in responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful. Furthermore, people can feel this failure in their daily lives: the weakness of wage growth, the unaffordability of home ownership, the escalating cost of higher education. Despite the deepest recession in living memory, most economies have grown since 2000. But for a lot of us — especially the young and those left behind by the geographical concentration of economic opportunity, things haven’t got better — and certainly not 20-years’-worth of better.

Suggested reading

What if we were to lose the last ten years of technological progress?

By Peter Franklin

Oh, but what about technology? Would you really want to swap your iPhone 11 for a BlackBerry 850? Your Samsung Galaxy A50 for an original Nokia 3310? Would you want the squat mass of CRT monitor sitting on your desk again? Do you miss the weird sounds made by a dial-up internet connection? Or download speeds that would make a tortoise blush?

Digital is one area where progress is unmistakable — and everyday life is different as a result. And yet, in 2000, the internet was still a hopeful place — we genuinely believed that tech would enable a great decentralisation of power. But that, of course was before Facebook and Amazon conquered the world; before the nastiness of online debate poisoned politics; before China began building its techno-totalitarian state.

In 2000, we had the convenience of mobile communication — minus the downsides we’ve come to discover since. There being no smartphones, we’d yet to be zombified by them. But what about the upsides of unlimited access to the global store of human knowledge? Well that, perhaps, is the most depressing thing about the 21st century so far. Previous breakthroughs in communication have triggered breakthroughs in science, industry, culture and philosophy. But what does the West have to show for the Internet? Science is slowing down and productivity is faltering. As for a 21st-century Renaissance or Enlightenment, where is it? (And, no, the Great Awokening doesn’t count).

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

I don’t want to be too much of a grump here. Taking a global view, I wouldn’t want to go back to the year 2000. Thanks to trends set in train decades previously, the last 20 years have improved conditions for most of humanity. As for the developed world, we shouldn’t deny the progress made this century — let’s count our blessings and be grateful for them.

And yet we could have, should have, achieved more. We’ve every right to be disappointed — both in our leaders and ourselves.

Yes, if they help us explore what might have happened in slightly different circumstances; no, if they’re merely what the author wishes had happened.

There’s a ripe example of the latter in The Economist — where the Bagehot column takes the form of an imagined extract from the memoirs that David Cameron “might have written had he won the Brexit referendum”.

I’m not sure whether ‘Bagehot’ is describing his own wishes, or channelling what he imagines Cameron’s might be – but either way the fantastical nature of the scenario is revealing. Its premise is that if the referendum had gone the other way, we would have seen “the death of Euroscepticism”:

“The fever of Euroscepticism eventually broke and Britain entered its current age of Euro-contentment. Nigel Farage moved to America for a gig with Fox News and a slot on the speaking circuit. I’m told that he has built quite a place in southern Florida — a mock-Tudor mansion complete with red telephone boxes and a working pub serving real ale, pie and mash. With his guiding hand removed, the UK Independence Party was captured by people who were so nauseating and ill-disciplined that membership collapsed.”

Like a lot of ‘alt-history’, this ignores the lessons of actual history. Take the result of the Scottish independence referendum – a clear defeat for the ‘Yes’ side, but did the “fever” of Scottish Nationalism break? Did the SNP collapse? No, they were greatly strengthened as a result — the beneficiaries of a nationalism that is defiant, not defeated.

A similar example is the shock defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, which helped to energise and radicalise the Democrats. Then there’s the actual result of the Brexit referendum, which created a mass Remain movement, capable of getting hundreds of thousands of people on the streets — and re-animating the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the evident willingness of the Remain Parliament to block Brexit has prompted a rebellion among Leave voters. Nigel Farage was able to bypass his dysfunctional old party, start a new one and take it to first place in the Euro elections. His comeback sealed Theresa May’s fate and propelled Boris Johnson into Downing Street.

Suggested reading

How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

Therefore the notion that a Leave defeat in 2016 would have prompted British euroscepticism to obediently curl-up-and-die is fanciful.

Bagehot (in the voice of David Cameron, remember) does try to make his scenario plausible:

“Millions of good people had voted to leave, not because they were fed up with Europe but because they were fed up with Britain. I tackled the Tory problem by forgiving the most talented Leavers, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, while simultaneously marginalising the irreconcilables… I dealt with the problem of the left-behind by announcing the end of austerity at the 2017 party conference and encouraging Boris, as business secretary, to make revitalising the North and the Midlands his priority — or, as he put it, a matter of ‘do or die’.”

But, again, this doesn’t stand up.

For a start, an alternative history in which Remain prevailed is most plausibly one in which the likes of Johnson and Gove did not join the Leave campaign. Therefore, there are no such figures to magnanimously bring back into the fold, because they never wandered off in the first place.

Also, what makes Bagehot think that Cameron would have reached out to the North and Midlands with a latter-day Marshall Plan? The essay-crisis Prime Minister, having got away with his referendum gamble, would sink back into his habitual complacency. His Chancellor, George Osborne, though happy to devolve power to England’s cities, would have continued his strategy of targeting the local government and social security budgets for the harshest cuts. As for the “end of austerity”, any extra money to play with would have been deployed with the 2020 general election at the forefront of his calculations. For a Remain Tory government, that would have meant holding on to southern seats gained from the Lib Dems in 2015, holding off a Labour advance in London and supporting Ruth Davidson’s progress in Scotland.

Suggested reading

Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

Bear in mind that even when the Conservatives have every electoral reason to make a compelling offer to Leave-voting Labour heartlands (as in 2017), they can’t seem to manage it. So the idea that this would have happened in the wake of a Cameron-led Remain victory is unconvincing.

Bagehot goes on to suggest that Cameron would have gradually patiently bent the EU to his will — for instance caving in on freedom of movement. But, most likely, the compromises would have been in the other direction. EU leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt and Ursula von der Leyen have continued to press for further expansions of the EU’s remit.

Though Cameron’s renegotiation deal prior to the referendum included an agreement to exempt the United Kingdom from the objective of “ever closer union” — those words, in the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, are of purely symbolic significance, therefore so was the exemption.

And yet with every new directive and regulation the UK would indeed find itself drawn closer into union with its neighbours — provoking bitter accusations that the renegotiation had been violated. The same would apply to every inevitable increase in the UK’s net contribution to the EU budget.

Suggested reading

What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

As for net immigration (from the EU), it’s reasonable to suppose that without Brexit it would be at a higher level — especially now with several Eurozone economies slowing down again. Cameron would have come under intense pressure to activate the renegotiation agreement’s ’emergency brake’ provisions — and would have faced the possibility of humiliation given the need for European Parliamentary approval. The same goes for the so-called Red Card provision — in theory a way of sending proposals back to the European Commission, but in practice requiring the support of 15 other EU member states.

Of course, it’s also reasonable to suppose that the UK economy would have grown faster over the past three years had Remain won. But that would have meant extra pressure on the UK to pay more into EU funds, employ more of Europe’s jobless and take in more external migrants. Even without the EU-ultras winning immediate victories on federalist measures such as a European Army or EU-wide taxation, Cameron would have had to make a never-ending series of smaller concessions — each one condemned by his enemies as a ‘betrayal’.

So, no, a Remain victory would not have ended the argument over Britain’s place in Europe. As is the case with independence for  Scotland, there’d have been calls for a second In/Out referendum by now — a ‘people’s vote’, if you will.