World 1745-1901

Trade and the morality of some trade such as slavery are brought into question during this period. Included here are articles providing information about the world structures and the challenges they experienced in this period. Key individuals are explored such as Thomas Payne, and how their reach was British, European and Global. In other articles the encounters with China that are taking place in the 19th century are discussed.

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  • Afghanistan in the 1950s - Films

    Article

    We are used to Afghanistan, and especially Helmand Province, being in the news recently. Afghanistan is seen as a source of conflict and terror. But here are some recently rediscovered films of the area in the 1950s that paint rather a different picture of the country - a picture of...

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  • Combating a Cook-centric past through co-curricular learning

    Article

    Combating a Cook-centric past through co-curricular learning: Year 9 dig out maps and rulers to challenge generalisations about the Age of Discovery Paula Worth presents in this article a means of challenging students' tendency to generalise even when they know that they should not. How can we encourage our students...

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  • The effect of the loss of the American Colonies upon British Policy

    Article

    (1) Problems of an Empire in ruinsTwo weeks after Yorktown, but before the news of that disaster had reached England, George III wrote to Lord North that "The dye is now cast whether this shall be a great Empire or the least dignified of European states." England had not fought...

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  • From Sail to Steam

    Article

    From the time when primitive man first went adrift on a bundle of reeds or learnt to balance himself on a floating log, to the days where his descendants, no more than a few generations ago, raced scrambling aloft to trim the towering sails of a full-rigged ship, the skill...

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  • Frederick Douglass in Britain

    Article

    Frederick Douglass, former slave and abolitionist, travelled to Great Britain in 1845 for nineteenth months, lecturing against slavery in the United States. To an American audience, Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most famous fugitive slave and one of the most important African American activists in American history. He is less...

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  • Empires of Gold

    Article

    In 1660, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was established under the leadership of Charles II's brother James, the Duke of York. Founded as a slaving company, the Royal African Company, as it became known, also traded in gold. African gold was mined in the interior before being...

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  • American West Depth Study Podcasts

    Article

    In this series of podcasts Dave Martin examines the American West. What is the American West depth study actually about?What can we learn from the parallel lives of Custer and Crazy Horse?Who was with Custer at the Little Big Horn?Why did the Plains Indians lose the struggle for the Great...

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  • Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action

    Article

    Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...

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  • Cunning Plan 143: enquiries about the British empire

    Article

    I wanted to give my Year 8 students ownership of their work on the British Empire by allowing them to suggest our ‘enquiry question'. In order to introduce the Empire, I brought in sugar, spices, bananas, chilli peppers and cotton. I then showed maps demonstrating the Empire at its height....

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  • Polychronicon 142: 'instructive reversals' - (re)interpreting the 1857 events in Northern India

    Article

    The dramatic, chaotic and violent events that took place in Northern India in 1857/8 have been interpreted in many ways, as, for example, the ‘Indian Mutiny', the ‘Sepoy War' and the ‘First Indian War of Independence'. The tales that have been told about these events have been profoundly shaped, however,...

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  • A Commercial Revolution

    Article

    The pattern of overseas trade is always in movement: new commodities are constantly appearing, old ones fading into unimportance, different trading partners coming to the fore-front. But between the latter end of the sixteenth and the second half of the eighteenth century, change took specially far reaching forms. In 1570...

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  • The War of American Independence

    Article

    In the two-hundredth year of American Independence, it is proper to ask: why did it occur? It need not have happened; it was the act of men, not immutable forces. But once the tensions became acute, the three thousand miles of ocean were a difficult chasm to bridge. The War...

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  • Understanding Slavery

    Article

    Teaching the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition in British history is now a compulsory component of the revised KS3 History curriculum. The Understanding Slavery Initiative (USI) is a national education project set up in 2003. The initiative has been developed in partnership with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,...

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  • The Pennsylvanian Origins of British Abolitionism

    Article

    It can have escaped the attention of very few people in the United Kingdom that 2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in British ships. Slavery itself continued to be legal in Britain and its colonies until the 1830s, while other nations continued both to...

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  • Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain

    Article

    Prior to abolition in 1807, Britain was the world’s leading slave trading nation. Of an estimated six million individuals forcibly transported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, almost 2.5 million (40 per cent) were carried in British vessels.2 The contemporary attitudes and assumptions which underpinned...

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  • The Slave trade and British Abolition, 1787-1807

    Article

    In the 1780’s the British slave trade thrived. In that decade alone more than one thousand British and British colonial slave ships sailed for the slave coasts of Africa and transported more than 300,000 Africans. There was little evidence that here was a system uncertain about its economic future. If...

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  • A-Level Essay: To what extent does the art of the Edo period of Japan reflect the contentment of the classes within its society?

    Article

    The Edo period in Japanese history fell between the years 1600 and 1867, beginning when Tokugawa Ieyatsu, a daimyo (samurai lord), became the strongest power in Japan, and ending with Tokugawa Keiki’s abdication. The Tokugawas claimed the hereditary title of Shogun, supreme governor of Japan. (The emperor had become a...

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  • Polychronicon 121: interpretations of the American Revolution

    Article

    Polychronicon is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon'focuses on the interpretations of the American Revolution.

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  • The first trans-Atlantic hero? General James Wolfe and British North America

    Article

    Early on the morning of 8 June 1758, British frigates unleashed their broadsides upon French shore defences at Gabarus Bay, on the foggy and surf-lashed island of Cape Breton. Under cover of the warships' guns, a motley flotilla of craft headed towards the land. Propelled by straining Royal Navy oarsmen,...

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  • How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE

    Article

    Mary Woolley decided to make four revision sheets for her lower-band Year 11 set. Each was to help them view their American West study through a different lens. She was rather uncertain, however (and so were the pupils) about her fourth sheet on places. Her reflections on the revision sheet...

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