Alternative Histories

A couple friends and I were discussing yesterday the genre of alternative histories. While fun thought experiments, we found that most alternative histories only conceive of how the world would be worst if some major historical event had gone otherwise. While it was easy to consider what might have happened if Hitler had won WWII or if Napoleon had successfully invaded Russia or if America had lost the Revolutionary War or the North the Civil War, it was more difficult to conceive of an alternative history that might have resulted in a better world than we currently have.

Was this simply a failure of imagination on our parts? Are we simply incapable of conceiving of a better possible world? Do we feel so trapped in history that we don't know how to mess with it to make it better? Are we just too euro-centric to consider alternative time-lines that aren't so euro-centric? Is this the best world we could plausibly build given all confluences of historical events preceding us? That seems depressing.

The closest we came up with for alternative histories that would have resulted in a better present are: 1) If Africa had developed a Enlightenment technologies and philosophies at or before the same time as the Europeans (thus preventing them from easy exploitation by the European colonizing powers), and 2) if Fossil Fuels had never been discovered, forcing a reliance on water and wind technologies early in the development of electricity, and thus negating any reliance on Mid-East oil (and the ensuing wars) later on.