World History
What the exam tests
World history items emphasize patterns across civilizations - belief systems, trade networks, empire-building, and the Columbian Exchange - more than isolated dates.
Core rules and concepts
- The Neolithic Revolution brought surplus, specialization, stratification, and greater exposure to disease; it was not uniformly better for health.
- River valley civilizations (Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Yellow) depended on irrigation, which required centralized coordination.
- Classical empires (Han, Rome, Maurya/Gupta) integrated diverse peoples with roads, currency, and law; their declines are multicausal.
- Trade networks spread goods and pathogens: Silk Roads (silk, Buddhism, plague), Indian Ocean (monsoon-dependent, Islam), trans-Saharan (gold, salt, Islam).
- Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century were destructive but reconnected Eurasia, spreading gunpowder, printing, and the Black Death.
- The Columbian Exchange after 1492 moved crops, animals, and diseases; smallpox devastated Indigenous populations, while maize and potatoes raised Eurasian populations.
- Industrialization began in Britain around 1750, then spread, feeding imperialism and later decolonization.
Worked example
Why Britain first? Reasoning chain: coal near water transport; capital from Atlantic trade and colonies; agricultural improvement freeing labor; high wages creating incentive for labor-saving machinery; patent law and stable finance. Each factor is necessary but not sufficient alone. A strong answer ranks them and notes that other regions held some factors but not the combination.
Traps
Assuming the Columbian Exchange was mainly goods (disease mattered more); treating Rome's fall as a single-event collapse; equating trade networks with peaceful exchange.