"...one of the most puzzling aspects of living in history is that's almost impossible to predict the course of future events; yet, once these events have happened, it's difficult to know what it would even mean to say something else 'could' have happened. A properly historical event has, perhaps, two qualities: it could not have been predicted beforehand, but it only happens once. One does not get to fight the Battle of Guagamela over again, to see what would have happened if Darius had actually won. Speculating what might have happened--had Alexander, say, been hit by a stray arrow, and there had never been a Ptolemaic Egypt or Seleucid Syria--is at best an idle game. It might raise profound questions--how much difference can an individual really make in history?--but nevertheless, these are questions that cannot ever be definitively answered.
The best we can do, when confronted with unique historical events or configurations such as the Persian or Hellenistic empires, is to engage in a project of comparison. This at least can give us an idea of the sort of things that might happen, and at best a sense of the pattern by which one thing is likely to follow another. The problem is that ever since the Iberian invasion of the Americas, and subsequent European colonial empires, we can't even really do that, because there's ultimately been just one political system and it is global."
Graeber, David and Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2021, pg. 449.
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