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What if key events in the past had gone another way? Niall Ferguson and his fellow historians trace nine such paths. They ask how Germany might have won the Second World War. They also look at a Russian win in the Cold War. They use these imagined events to help explain the real past.

This book asks “what if” questions about the modern era. It is for general readers and those who study history. In one study, Charles I avoids civil war. In another, Britain keeps its colonies in America. Britain stays out of the war in August 1914. Nazi Germany beats the Soviet Union. Nazi forces take over England. Other studies ask if the Cold War could have been avoided. They ask what might change if Kennedy lived to serve his full term. Another asks how Europe might look if communism had lasted past 1989.

One study starts with Charles I beating the Scottish Covenanters. Three revolutions then fail to take place. It ends as a West under Anglo-American rule falls apart. These changes serve the book's main aim. It seeks to show how past choices shaped today's world.

Some of the writers teach history as professors at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Cătălin Drăcșineanu translated this second edition.