World History
Domain overview
World History in this paper runs from the Renaissance to the post-Cold War order. It tests transitions - religious, political, industrial and imperial - and the ability to explain causes and consequences across regions.
Core concepts
- Renaissance and Reformation: humanism, print culture; Luther's 1517 theses and the fragmentation of Western Christianity.
- Revolutions: American 1776, French 1789 (liberty, equality, sovereignty), Industrial Revolution (coal, steam, factories, urbanisation).
- World wars: WWI 1914–18 and the Versailles settlement; WWII 1939–45; Holocaust and atomic bomb.
- Institutions: League of Nations 1920; UN 1945; decolonisation; NAM 1961; Cold War.
- Post-1989: fall of the Berlin Wall, dissolution of the USSR 1991, globalisation.
Worked example
Why did the League of Nations fail to prevent the Second World War? Answer: the USA never joined; the League lacked enforcement capacity; unanimity made decisions slow; economic depression and revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) ignored it. Reasoning: the League was a security organisation without great-power backing, so its sanctions were not credible. Deliver the argument as a chain, not as a list of dates.
Traps
- Presenting the Cold War as a direct shooting war between the USA and USSR.
- Confusing the causes and consequences of WWI.
- Claiming the UN replaced the League immediately in 1920; the UN was founded in 1945.
- Treating decolonisation as a single event rather than a process.