NSSCAS History 8234 cheat sheet

Chronology: establish sequence before causation; a timeline error invalidates any causal claim built on it.

Periodisation is a judgement, not a fact: state the criteria (political, economic, social) used to mark a turning point.

Continuity and change: identify what persisted as well as what altered; most revolutions leave much unchanged.

Cause: distinguish long-term structural causes, medium-term precipitants and short-term triggers, and rank their weight.

Consequence: separate intended from unintended outcomes and short-term from long-term effects.

Significance: judge by scale of impact, depth (how many lives changed), durability and contemporary resonance.

Interpretation questions require evaluating why historians differ (evidence, method, context, values), not just summarising views.

Utility questions: assess a source on provenance, purpose, audience, date and content, then state what it can and cannot prove.

Primary source tests: origin (who, when, where), purpose, audience, tone, and the interests served by its content.

Reliability is claim-specific: a tax record may be reliable for revenue and unreliable for living standards.

Bias does not equal uselessness; a partisan source reveals the author's assumptions and the rhetoric of the period.

Corroboration: two independent sources agreeing is stronger than many derivative sources repeating one origin.

Silence in the record is evidence of power: ask whose voice is absent and why (illiteracy, censorship, archive access).

Historiographical schools: empiricist/positivist, Marxist (class and mode of production), Annales (longue durée, mentalités), social history 'from below', cultural/linguistic turn, postcolonial and subaltern studies.

Postcolonial critique (Said's Orientalism, Spivak's subaltern, Chakrabarty's provincialising Europe) interrogates how knowledge about colonised societies was produced.

Oral tradition and memory: evaluate transmission, genre conventions and interviewer effect; oral testimony supplements rather than replaces documentary evidence.

Long-distance trade shaped states: trans-Saharan gold and salt, Indian Ocean ivory and slaves, Atlantic slave trade (peak 18th century, abolished British 1807, Brazil trade to 1850).

State formation examples: Asante (gold, kola, centralised bureaucracy), Dahomey (royal monopoly, slave trade then palm oil), Zulu kingdom under Shaka (c. 1816–28), Sokoto Caliphate (Usman dan Fodio's jihad from 1804).

Legitimate commerce: palm oil, groundnuts, cocoa and rubber replaced slave exports from the mid-19th century, tying producers to world prices.

Partition: Berlin Conference (1884–85) set rules for effective occupation and free trade; it did not itself divide territory.

Resistance and adaptation: Samori Touré (West Africa), the Maji Maji rebellion (German East Africa, 1905–07), Herero and Nama war (1904–08), Bambatha (1906).

Colonial economies: railway and port construction, migrant labour, hut and poll taxes forcing wage labour, cash-crop monoculture.

Twentieth-century nationalism: pan-African congresses (1900, 1919, 1945 Manchester), négritude (Senghor, Césaire), trade unions and newspapers as mobilising networks.

Independence dates: Ghana 1957, Guinea 1958, Nigeria and most French colonies 1960, Kenya 1963, Zimbabwe 1980, Namibia 1990, South Africa 1994.

Modes of rule: direct administration (French assimilation/association, Portuguese) versus indirect rule (Lugard's system via 'native authorities' in Northern Nigeria).

Settler colonies (Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa) produced land alienation, pass laws and sharper racial hierarchies than extractive colonies.

Legal instruments: Crown land ordinances, native reserves, hut tax, forced labour ordinances, and the 1889–90 Brussels Act on slavery in Africa.

Economic mechanisms: concession companies (Congo Free State under Leopold II), chartered companies (BSAC 1889), and mineral enclaves (Katanga copper, Witwatersrand gold from 1886).

Ideology: 'civilising mission', Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and the 'dual mandate' (Lugard) framed exploitation as trusteeship.

Colonial knowledge: censuses, maps, codified 'customary law' and invented ethnic categories hardened fluid identities.

Collaboration and coercion: chiefs appointed or deposed by administrators; middlemen, clerks and mission-educated elites as intermediaries.

Legacies debated: infrastructure and literacy versus distorted economies, arbitrary borders, unresolved land questions and weak institutions.

Post-1945 accelerators: Atlantic Charter (1941), UN Charter (1945), Indian independence (1947), Bandung Conference (1955), Suez crisis (1956), Ghana's independence (1957).

Constitutional routes: legislative councils, elections, internal self-government, then independence; French Union and 1958 referendum (Guinea voted 'no').

Mass nationalism: strikes, boycotts, newspapers, churches and schools; examples include the 1945–46 Nigerian general strike and the 1947–48 Accra boycotts.

Armed struggle: Mau Mau (Kenya, 1952–60), FLN Algeria (1954–62), FRELIMO (Mozambique), MPLA (Angola), ZANU (Zimbabwe), SWAPO (Namibia).

Algeria: Évian Accords 1962 ended 132 years of French rule after a war costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Congo crisis 1960–65: Lumumba's assassination (January 1961), Katanga secession, and UN intervention (ONUC).

Cold War entanglement: superpower patronage, coups (Ghana 1966), and non-alignment as a strategy at the UN.

Neocolonial critique: dependency theory (Prebisch, Frank), structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s, and debt as continuing constraint.

Precolonial: San hunter-gatherers, Khoikhoi pastoralists, Ovambo and Herero agro-pastoralists; long-distance trade in cattle, ivory and copper.

German South West Africa (1884–1915): colonial rule formalised by the 1884 flag-raising at Angra Pequena (Lüderitz) and the 1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty.

Herero and Nama war (1904–08): General Lothar von Trotha's extermination order (October 1904); tens of thousands died, with land and cattle confiscated.

South African rule: invasion 1915, League of Nations mandate 1920, and the Odendaal Plan (1964) creating bantustans such as Ovamboland.

SWAPO founded 1960 (from the Ovamboland People's Organization, 1959); armed struggle began with the 1966 attack at Omugulugwombashe.

Legal turning points: ICJ rulings 1966 and 1971; UN Security Council Resolution 435 (1978) set the independence framework; UN Resolution 269 (1969) declared South Africa's occupation illegal.

Transition: US-brokered tripartite accords (December 1988) linked Cuban withdrawal from Angola to Namibian independence; UNTAG supervised elections in November 1989.

Independence 21 March 1990 under President Sam Nujoma; the 1990 Constitution's Article 144 incorporates international law; Walvis Bay returned by South Africa in 1994.

French Revolution: 1789 Estates-General and Bastille; 1793 execution of Louis XVI; 1793–94 Terror under the Committee of Public Safety; Napoleon emperor 1804.

Congress of Vienna (1814–15): restoration, balance of power, and the Concert of Europe; 1848 revolutions failed but spread liberal and nationalist ideas.

Industrialisation: coal, iron, steam and railways; Britain's lead, later German and US catch-up; social consequences include urbanisation and organised labour.

Unification: Italy 1861–70 (Cavour, Garibaldi), Germany 1871 (Bismarck, Prussian victory over France 1870–71).

Causes of WWI: alliance blocs (Triple Alliance 1882, Entente 1904/1907), naval rivalry, Balkan nationalism, and the Sarajevo assassination (28 June 1914).

Russian Revolution 1917: February overthrew the tsar; October Bolshevik coup under Lenin; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) and civil war 1918–21.

Interwar: Treaty of Versailles (1919) war guilt and reparations, hyperinflation 1923, Great Depression from 1929, and the rise of fascism and Nazism (Hitler chancellor January 1933).

WWII turning points: Dunkirk and Battle of Britain 1940, Operation Barbarossa June 1941, Pearl Harbor December 1941, Stalingrad 1942–43, D-Day June 1944, Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 1945.

Origins: Yalta and Potsdam (1945), Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947), Berlin Blockade and airlift (1948–49), NATO (1949) and Warsaw Pact (1955).

Containment doctrine (Kennan's 'Long Telegram', 1946) shaped US policy until 1991; rollback and détente were later variations.

Crises: Korean War (1950–53), Hungarian uprising (1956), Berlin Wall (1961), Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), Prague Spring (1968), Afghanistan (1979–89).

Nuclear arms control: Test Ban Treaty 1963, SALT I 1972, INF Treaty 1987, START 1991.

End of the Cold War: Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika from 1985, Eastern European revolutions of 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), dissolution of the USSR (December 1991).

Decolonised world: Non-Aligned Movement (Belgrade 1961), Sino-Soviet split, and proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.

Post-1991 order: Gulf War 1991, Rwandan genocide 1994, Dayton Accords 1995, 9/11 and the 'War on Terror', 2008 financial crisis.

Institutions: UN Security Council vetoes, Bretton Woods bodies (IMF, World Bank), GATT/WTO (1995), and the African Union (2002, successor to the OAU of 1963).