Causation: why things happened
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.
One cause can create the next
Causes are not always independent items on a list — a long-term cause can create the conditions in which a short-term cause becomes possible. Economic hardship over a decade (long-term) can make a poor harvest (short-term) into a crisis rather than a hardship, because there is no reserve left to absorb it. Tracing HOW one cause fed into another, rather than treating each as separate, is what turns a list of causes into an explanation of a chain of events.
A sentence that actually weighs
WEAK: "There were many causes of the First World War, including alliances, militarism, imperial rivalry and the assassination in Sarajevo." STRONGER: "The assassination mattered as a trigger, but it was the alliance system that turned a regional dispute into a war between six great powers — the alliances did the most work, and the assassination only supplied the moment." Naming which cause did the most work, and saying what the others contributed by comparison, is what a weighed paragraph looks like on the page.