Exam Weighting: About 8–10% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• State-building in East Asia — the Song Dynasty, its technological achievements, and political structures.

• Dar al-Islam — the expansion of Islamic trade networks across Afro-Eurasia.

• South and Southeast Asia — the Delhi Sultanate, maritime trade, and cultural exchange.

• The Americas before European contact — Aztec and Inca empires, regional civilisations.

• African kingdoms — Mali, Great Zimbabwe, Swahili Coast trade cities.

• European feudalism, the Catholic Church, and the seeds of later change.

Exam Weighting: About 8–10% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Silk Roads — overland Afro-Eurasian trade routes and the goods, ideas, and diseases they carried.

• The Indian Ocean trade network — monsoon winds, Arabic and Chinese maritime technology, trade diasporas.

• The trans-Saharan trade routes — gold, salt, enslaved people, and the spread of Islam in West Africa.

• The Mongol Empire — conquest, the Pax Mongolica, and the Black Death's spread along trade routes.

• How exchange networks transmitted religion, language, technology, and epidemic disease across regions.

Exam Weighting: About 12–15% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The gunpowder empires — Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal — their rise, administration, and religious policies.

• Ming and Qing China — isolationism, tributary systems, and agrarian bureaucracy.

• The expansion and administration of land-based European states.

• How empires maintained control through military power, religious legitimacy, and bureaucratic systems.

• Comparison of different imperial structures across multiple regions.

Exam Weighting: About 12–15% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• European maritime expansion — Portuguese and Spanish exploration, Columbus, and the Age of Discovery.

• The Columbian Exchange — the transfer of crops, animals, diseases, and people between hemispheres.

• The transatlantic slave trade — scale, routes, the Middle Passage, and its global consequences.

• Colonial systems in the Americas — encomienda, plantation agriculture, racial hierarchies.

• Global silver trade — Spanish American silver, Ming China's demand, and interconnected markets.

• The rise of joint-stock companies and early commercial capitalism.

Exam Weighting: About 12–15% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Enlightenment — rationalism, natural rights, and the ideological foundations of revolution.

• Atlantic revolutions — American, French, Haitian, and Latin American independence movements.

• The Industrial Revolution — origins in Britain, spread to Europe and North America, changing labour systems.

• Reform movements — abolitionism, women's suffrage, labour rights, and nationalist movements.

• The transformation of global trade, urbanisation, and economic inequality.

Exam Weighting: About 12–15% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The New Imperialism — European colonisation of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

• Economic imperialism and the role of industrial capitalism in driving colonial expansion.

• Responses to colonialism — resistance movements, accommodation, and collaboration.

• The Berlin Conference, the Scramble for Africa, and the carving-up of the Global South.

• Social Darwinism and racial ideologies used to justify imperial domination.

• Migration patterns — contract labour, indentured servitude, and diaspora communities.

Exam Weighting: About 8–10% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The causes, course, and consequences of World War I — total war, nationalism, the collapse of empires.

• The Russian Revolution and the rise of communism as a global force.

• The interwar period — fascism, global depression, the rise of authoritarian regimes.

• World War II — causes, major theatres, the Holocaust, and the atomic age.

• Decolonisation and the emergence of newly independent nations across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Exam Weighting: About 8–10% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The origins and early Cold War — Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, proxy conflicts.

• The Non-Aligned Movement and the politics of decolonisation.

• Cold War conflicts — Korean War, Vietnam War, Cuban Missile Crisis.

• Independence movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean — challenges and outcomes.

• The arms race, the space race, and technology as Cold War competition.

Exam Weighting: About 8–10% of the total exam.

What You’ll Learn:

• The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

• Economic globalisation — trade liberalisation, multinational corporations, supply chains.

• Technology and communication — the internet, social media, and the acceleration of global exchange.

• Global challenges — climate change, terrorism, migration crises, and pandemic disease.

• International organisations — the UN, IMF, World Bank, and debates over global governance.