65 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
This theme has two halves that look quite different from one another. The first is history, trade and empire and the people who moved because of them. The second is the organisations the UK belongs to today, which comes from the government chapter rather than the history one. Practising them together is useful, because the second half is largely the result of the first.
The history runs in order. Wool was the important English export of the Middle Ages, and canal builders came over from Holland. Under the Tudors and Stuarts, English and Scottish Protestants were settled in Ulster in what were called plantations. The East India Company was set up to trade, and textiles, tea and spices came back from India and from what we now call Indonesia.
Then the wider empire. Thirteen American colonies declared independence in 1776 and Britain recognised it in 1783, and a revolution in France in 1789 was followed by the new French government declaring war on Britain. Slavery is asked about closely. William Wilberforce is the member of Parliament named, an abolitionist was someone who supported ending it, the slaves on British ships were taken mostly out of West Africa, and around two million workers were brought over from India and China afterwards to replace those who had been freed.
The nineteenth century adds the Highland Clearances, the Irish famine caused by the failure of the potato crop, in which about a million people died, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the hall of glass and steel known as the Crystal Palace. At its height the empire covered around 400 million people and it kept expanding until roughly the 1920s. Migration into Britain is asked about across the whole period, from Jewish people settling in London again in 1656 to around 120,000 arriving from Russia and Poland between 1870 and 1914 to escape persecution.
After 1945 the questions turn to independence and to work. Nine countries won their independence in 1947, India among them, and Ceylon is now Sri Lanka. The country had to be rebuilt and there were too few hands to do it, so people were invited over, from Ireland and the rest of Europe and then from further afield. That movement lasted about twenty five years, until new laws at the end of the 1960s restricted it, asking from then on for a close family or birth connection to Britain. Shortly afterwards Britain admitted 28,000 people of Indian origin who had been forced to leave Uganda.
The last part is the present day. The Commonwealth, the European Union and the European Economic Community it grew out of, the Council of Europe, the United Nations and NATO. These questions ask what each body is for, who belongs to it and what it can and cannot do.
The history half is mostly plain recall of a year, a place or a name, with a steady run of questions that want a quantity. How many colonies, how many people across the empire, how many died in the famine, how many arrived from Uganda. Those are worth a second look, because the wrong options are deliberately close, often the same digits with a nought added or taken away.
The institutions half rewards understanding what each body is for rather than memorising it. The Commonwealth is a group of countries backing each other towards shared goals, membership is by choice, the King heads it in a ceremonial role, and the one real power it holds over a member is to suspend that membership. The Council of Europe is there for human rights. The United Nations was set up once the Second World War ended, to keep the peace between nations. NATO is a pledge of mutual defence across Europe and North America, made against the threat the Soviet bloc then posed. Hold those four apart and most of this block answers itself.
The Council of Europe is not the European Union. It is a separate body and its job is human rights. Nothing about it depends on EU membership.
Three pairs of years, and each pair is asked both ways. 1807 stopped slaves being traded in British ships and ports, while 1833 ended slavery itself across the empire. 1776 is when the American colonies declared independence, 1783 when Britain recognised it. 1957 is when six western European countries signed the Treaty of Rome and formed the European Economic Community, the body the European Union grew out of, and 1973 is when the UK joined.
Three United Nations numbers. More than 190 countries belong to it, the Security Council has 15 members, and 5 of those hold a permanent seat. The UK is one of the five.
Which group came from where, and when. The West Indies from 1948, India and Pakistan for the textile and engineering firms, Bangladesh later, and Uganda in the early 1970s. A question will usually give you one of those and ask for the other, so learn them as pairs rather than as a list of places.
One question wants the proportion of the population with a foreign-born parent or grandparent, and the handbook puts it at nearly ten per cent. That figure was written in 2013 and migration has been higher since, so the true share today is likely to be larger. The test still marks the handbook's answer correct, so answer the book. When this one comes up in practice, a Worth knowing note appears beside the answer with the position now, so you learn both.
Pick this one if the modern organisations are what feel vague, because that half of the theme is examined in its own right in chapter 5 as well and the revision counts twice. It also sits well next to Government, Parliament and Politics, which takes the same chapter from the domestic side. If it is the history you want rather than the institutions, the wider track is chapter 3.