Do certain schools of history take to counterfactual thinking more than others?

This question is prompted by my encounter with an an economic historian's article that is attempting to parse the differences between well established economic history (which in its current form mostly draws from economists and their methods according to him) and new "historians of capitalism" who take critical looks at business and economics but seem to br disengaged from the scholarship of economic historians.

Here's an example of counterfactual thinking by an economic historian (pg. 31-32):

The main arguments of the books of the new historians of capitalism all encompass causal statements. These statements contain implicit counterfactuals, but few of them are expressed in clear terms, and none of them are evaluated carefully. For example, the three books on slavery each argue, in slightly different ways, that American slavery led to or was necessary for the Industrial Revolution.^56 This sounds reasonable: American slave plantations became the most significant producers of raw cotton for the British market, and raw cotton was a necessary input for the British textile producers who were the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution. But carefully evaluating this assertion may lead to a different conclusion.^57

Let’s assume that American raw cotton was actually necessary for the Industrial Revolution. The question then is whether slavery was essential for the production of that cotton, or stated in counterfactual terms, whether in the absence of American slavery, the raw cotton necessary for the Industrial Revolution could have been produced. The production of American cotton was indeed dominated by slave plantations, and the small yeoman farmers of the south were often engaged in subsistence farming. Yet the inference that slave agriculture was necessary for large-scale cotton production in the American south, or that smallholders could not be viable producers of cotton there, is unwarranted. Research by David Weiman (1985) has shown that following the Civil War and emancipation, the expansion of transportation infrastructure and the growth of commercial centers in the Upcountry region of Georgia enabled the small yeoman farmers there to reorient their production away from subsistence and toward cotton—and their cotton production grew dramatically in the 1870s. The political and economic institutions of slavery likely constrained the development of railroads and market infrastructure in the Upcountry, and effectively blocked many smallholders from the market access that would have enabled them to become viable cotton producers.^58 Once slavery was gone and problems associated with market access were resolved, the yeomen of the Upcountry were able to major cotton producers. Given that the soil and climate of parts of the American south made it among the most productive areas in the world for growing cotton, it is not unreasonable to expect that smallholders without slaves could have produced very large cotton crops there. Absent slavery, the quantities produced may not have increased as rapidly, but American cotton farms would still have served the demand of British producers.^59 Slavery was not actually necessary for the Industrial Revolution.

[Footnotes]

56 For example, Beckert (2014) states that “while in the eighteenth century, slavery had enabled industrial takeoff, it now [in the nineteenth century] became integral to its continued expansion” (p. 117). He also quotes the American Cotton Planter from 1853 apparently with approval, as stating “it is idle to talk of producing Cotton for the world’s supply with free labor” (p. 119). Baptist (2014) claims not only slavery but the torture of slaves was the “ultimate cause” of the Industrial Revolution (p. 130). Johnson is not as explicit or direct on this point, and rejects counterfactual analysis, stating simply that “in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capitalism without slavery” (p. 254).

57 The validity of this counterfactual is evaluated in greater detail in Olmstead and Rhode (2016) and Majewski (2015).

58 Weiman (1985) shows that rail access, coupled with the processing and storage facilities that developed in the Upcountry cities, substantially increased the price local farmers could obtain for their cotton, and provided them with better access to market information.

59 As Majewski (2015) and Olmstead and Rhode (2016) note, after the Civil War ended and the slaves were emancipated, cotton production continued. There was an initial decline in total cotton output, but enormous quantities of raw cotton were nonetheless produced without slavery. This is another indication that slavery was not actually necessary.

[Citations]

Baptist, Edward. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Beckert, Sven. 2011. “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, for the American Historical Association.

Beckert, Sven. 2015. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Majewski, John. 2015. “Slavery and Capitalism: A Critique of the Recent Literature.” Working paper.

Olmstead, Alan, and Paul Rhode. 2008a. “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Economy,” NBER Working Paper Series, number 14142.

Weiman, David. 1985. “The Economic Emancipation of the Non-Slaveholding Class: Upcountry Farmers in the Georgia Cotton Economy,” Journal of Economic History 45(1): 71-93.

How influential is Clauswitz on our understanding of the philosophy of history? Everyone studies him and quotes him, but has he fundamentally changed the way we view the history of conflict?

The talk of calendars earlier this week and whether we know something was of a certain date brought a question to my mind.

How do we date events when our sources don't date them, not even the years?

And how do we date events when multiple sources give different dates for it?

What comes to my mind for me is the years that Philip of Macedon spent his time in Greece.