Professional historians have long treated counterfactual reasoning with suspicion, and the suspicion is selectively applied. Any causal claim about the past implies a counterfactual: to say that a policy caused a famine is to say that the famine would not have occurred, or would have been smaller, had the policy differed. Historians who reject counterfactuals while making causal claims are rejecting the explicit statement of something their argument already contains. What can reasonably be resisted is the elaborate counterfactual narrative, in which a single change propagates through decades and the author's preferences determine the outcome at every branch. The discipline's instinct is sound and its stated reason is not, which matters because the bad reason has been used to dismiss the disciplined version along with the indulgent one. Method and metaphysics are entangled here in a way the profession has preferred not to unpick.