What is the Best Counterfactual for the Long Ninteenth Century?

The possible victory of Germany in World War II (WWII) is the standard counterfactual for the Long Nineteenth Century (see the Notes below and the video above). Although interesting, I'm not sure it's the best counterfactual, at least from the standpoint of World-Systems Theory (WST).

From the WST perspective a more interesting counterfactual is "What If WWI, the Great Depression and WWII had never happened". What would the history of Long Twentieth Century have been?

If we have systems models of the major countries in both the 19th and 20th Centuries, we can forecast the 19th Century models into the 20th Century to create an alternative history where WWI, the Great Depression and WWII never happened. When then compare the actual paths of the comparable 20th Century models to see what was actually different.

One possible problem is that the data for the 19th Century, the War and Inter-War Periods are not great for most countries in the World-System. However, what we can do is focus on the estimated Systems Models which do show variability across the major countries over the time period (0-2000+, see examples here).

In future posts, I will start with the World System (WL19 and WE20) and then go on to the other major countries in the Long Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Germany, the UK, France, the US, Italy, Japan, Russia, etc.).

I have already started with some countries, for example France as an example (here). From the FRL19 model, it turns out that the Great Depression and possibly the collapse during WWI can be predicted in France from 19th Century data. The same is not the case for the DEL19D Model (Pasdirtz, 1981).

Notes

• The Long Nineteenth Century a term for the 125-year period beginning with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and ending with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It was coined by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and later popularized by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
• The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1962, which imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II.
• Hypothetical Victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of the Second World War (1939–1945)  a popular topic in the alternate history sub-genre of speculative fiction and in scholarly works that discuss the possible alternative path of history.
• Pasdirtz, G. W. (1981) Instability and Late Nineteenth Century German Development UW-Madison Thesis.