You allknow the nursery rhyme:
“for want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost…for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost”
So, does history turn on such small, random events?
I always wonder about Napoleon…supposedly, he lost the battle of Waterloo because of a painful attack of stomach ulcers…had Napoleon been healthy that day, it is entirely conceiveable that the British and Prussian forces would have been sopundly routed, leaving France as the dominant world power for thenext 200 years!
Perhaps WWs I and II would never have happened…and the British would have become a minor power! Or, suppose that somebody threw a beer stein at Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1920, killing him? The whole horror that was WWII might never have happened.
So, do huge changes in the direction of history hinge on personalities? Or are the forces that drive history larger than individuals? Had Adolf Hitler been killed, wouldsome other Nazi emerged to take his place?
Have at it!:eek:
I think history can be considered a chaotic system in the mathematical sense, whereby small changes have enormous eventual consequences.
Yes and no.
Some things are more or less bound to happen. Like with Hitler. If he had been killed early on, it is very likely that another form of fascist government would have come to the front. The situation was ripe for it to happen. Whether this movement would also have capitalised on anti-semitism is more open but another world war might still be very likely.
Most movements and innovations/inventions are very likely to come about, regardless of a key figure or happening because they are a likely next step.
However there are things that have shaped our world that are largely dependant on a key element that went right or wrong.
Battles are foremost in this.
Who wins a war can have a very large effect on who’s views of the world get to be implemented. Winning battles is therefore very important and the outcome of a battle can indeed depend on very trivial things.
Quite a bit of history would have been vastly different if an X carrying sperm had succeeded in the fertilisation rather than a Y carrying sperm. Is that small enough?
If I hadn’t been in the bar that night, I might never have met Mrs. Moto.
We wouldn’t, then, have our nine-month-old twins, who are obviously destined for greatness someday. I’m thinking Sara and Francis could be a presidential dynasty.
So yes, history can turn on trivial events. 
Well, since the OP mentions Napoleon… if the island of Corsica hadn’t become a French possession when it did, Napoleon wouldn’t have been a French citizen at all, and he wouldn’t have played the role in history that he did.
Little things like that (Corsica was a pretty insignificant piece of real estate, after all, and the Bourbon kings certainly didn’t pay it much mind) CAN make a huge difference.
IANAHistorian (not a professional one, anyway), but basically it sounds like Latro has it right:
Historians distinguish between “first-order counterfactuals” (where a change in a major historical event changes everything thereafter - say if the Spanish Armada had beaten Britain’s navy and then successfully invaded the country) and “second-order counterfactuals” (where a specific historical event might have been different than what actually happened, but later on things end up as they would have anyway - as in the example of Hitler getting killed but someone else coming to power in Germany and starting WWII).
So one can say regarding FOCFs that history can be affected by small events, but less so regarding SOCFs. (To be sure, one historian’s FOCF is often another’s second-order one.)
Small events can certainly change history, but the trick is predicting them in advance.
You might get a kick out of Connie Willis’ “To Say Nothing of the Dog”. It’s a time-travel novel filled with all sorts of anecdotes about tiny effects changing history. Waterloo gets its fair share of attention.
Yes, I agree, but there’s more to chaos theory than that. In a chaotic system, although specific responses to specific inputs are essentially unpredictable, there is still a “strange attractor” around which the responses concentrate. Even though small-order changes look random, there is still a large-order structure that is essentially unaffected by them.
Some historians separate short-, medium, and long-term situations when trying to make sense of the past, sometimes analogizing them to ripples, tides, and changes of sea level. The ascension of a particular leader may matter for a while, but its effects will be constrained by larger socioeconomic factors, which will mean nothing compared to the beginning or end of an ice age, for instance.
I suppose the only non-opinion answer can be that we simply don’t know, sicne we have no other history that we can be assured of to compare it to.
I’m sure that it does. For all the talk about historical inevitability, important occurrences seem to frequently stem from chance meetings. Something like the original event mifght turn out if a different path had been followed, but it certainly wouldn’t be identical.
There are a lot of “alternate history” works out there. Some is listed as Science Fiction (like Harry Turtledove’s stuff), while some is classified under “History”. But they all seem to think that things could have turned out vastly different because of single events. Look at L. Sprague deCamp’s time-ytravel fantasy Lest Darkness Fall, arguably the classic work in this genre. The hero is able to halt the “decline” of the Wesstern Roman Empire by interfering in a small event (along with the inventions he introduces).
And I’ll second the thing about meeting one’s SO. If I hadn’t been walking down Boylston Street in Boston on a particular night and not recognized (for reasons still not clear to me) a group of tourists as science fiction fans, I’d never have met her. (and she wasn’t even in that group pf fans.)
One amazingly tiny event that influenced history is mentioned in the Connie Willis book I mentioned. Possibly apocryphal, but when Louis the XVI and his family were fleeing to Austria during the French Revolution, they stopped to ask directions. He tipped the peasant with a coin with his portrait on it. The peasant recognized the King from the portraint and ran to notify the local revolutionaries who set up a roadblock; the King and Marie Antoinette were arrested and eventually executed. Without the royal presence for resistance to center around, the Revolution ran its course and eventually resulted in the Napoleanic Wars.
There is the example of WWI which is often spoken of as resulting from the assination of the Arch Duke. However, the general war was brought on by the interlaced set of mutual defense treaties that came into play once Austria-Hungaria declared war on Serbia.
So the cards were all stacked up, so to speak, and it only took a small puff of air to bring them down. The existence of the network of treaties might be the analog of the “strange attractor” with the assassination as the “butterfly’s wing.”