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History · GCSE · The School
Layers of cause
Historians separate LONG-TERM causes, building over years or decades; SHORT-TERM causes, in the months before; and the TRIGGER, the immediate event that set things off. The trigger is rarely the most important — a war does not happen because of one incident, but that incident is when it started.
Weighing, not listing
A list of causes answers almost nothing. The question is which mattered MOST, and why. That means arguing: this cause was necessary, that one only made things faster, this other one would have produced the same result eventually. Examiners credit the weighing, not the length of the list.
Testing a cause
A useful test is to remove a cause and ask whether the event would still have happened. If yes, it was contributing rather than necessary. If no, it was necessary — though rarely sufficient on its own. Saying which of those a cause was is what turns description into analysis.
Causes of the English Civil War. LONG-TERM: disputes over royal authority going back decades, religious division, Charles's belief in divine right. SHORT-TERM: the eleven years of personal rule, ship money, the Scottish wars. TRIGGER: the attempted arrest of the five members in January 1642. Now WEIGH: without the long-term dispute over authority the trigger is a scandal, not a war — so the trigger explains the timing and the long-term causes explain the war.
Necessary is not the same as sufficient
Some causes had to be present for the event to happen at all; others made it likely once the conditions existed. Long-term resentment may be necessary without being sufficient — it was there for decades without the event. Separating the two explains why something happened THEN rather than earlier, which is usually the harder half of the question.
Use the counterfactual as a test, not a claim
Ask "if this were removed, would it still have happened?" as a way of weighing a cause, and then argue from the evidence rather than from the hypothetical. Examiners reward the reasoning it produces — "remove the harvest failure and the protest still has its leaders, its grievance and its date" — not the speculation itself.