After decades of efforts to ‘decenter’ and ‘provincialize’ Europe, Europe nonetheless remains central to debates about the biggest changes of the last few centuries: the ‘Great Divergence’ between ‘the West and the rest,’ the origins of ‘modernity,’ and the legacies of colonialism. There is no truly non-Eurocentric version of history. So what if we took Europe out of the story by imagining the last 500 years without its inputs? Even as such a grandiose scheme violates the most basic rules and expectations of counterfactual reasoning, it is not as hopeless as it might seem. Just like any other counterfactual exercise, it challenges established ways of envisioning processes of causation by exploring the role of competing causes and the nature and plausible counterfactual impact of pre-empted factors. My experiment ties in both with recent work on counterfactual methodology and with macrohistorical research undertaken by Peter Turchin and associates.