AQA A-Level History — The British Empire c1857–1967: exam questions, mark schemes & model answers

Question 130 marksAssess how convincing· AQA A-Level History Paper 1 Section A (style)

Read the three extracts below and then answer the question that follows.

Extract A — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that economic forces were the driving motive behind the expansion of the British Empire after 1857.

The momentum of British expansion in the later nineteenth century cannot be separated from the demands of an industrial economy hungry for markets, raw materials and outlets for surplus capital. Cotton manufacturers needed Indian and Egyptian fibre; investors sought the higher returns offered by railways, mines and plantations across the tropics. Where formal annexation followed, it generally followed the flag of trade rather than preceding it. The occupation of Egypt in 1882 secured the route to the Indian market and protected the bondholders who had lent so heavily to the Khedive. Even the rhetoric of duty and civilisation served, in practice, to dignify the pursuit of profit. Strategic anxieties were real, yet they were repeatedly shaped by the prior assumption that British prosperity depended upon unimpeded access to overseas resources. Empire, in this reading, was the political expression of an expanding commercial system.

Extract B — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that strategic and geopolitical calculation, rather than economics, drove imperial expansion.

To explain late-Victorian expansion chiefly by commerce is to mistake the dog for its tail. Much of the territory acquired in Africa after 1880 was of negligible economic value and known to be so at the time; ministers in London were frequently reluctant rather than greedy. What moved them was the defence of established interests, above all the security of India and the sea-lanes that bound it to Britain. The occupation of Egypt arose from a collapse of order that threatened the Suez Canal, not from a settled design to enrich investors. Once France, Germany and others entered the field, the logic of pre-emption took hold: territory was seized lest a rival seize it first. Expansion was thus reactive and defensive, a response to perceived threats on the periphery, and the rhetoric of trade often masked anxieties that were fundamentally about power and position.

Extract C — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that cultural and ideological conviction was central to imperial expansion.

Neither ledgers nor maps fully account for the energy of British expansion. The age was suffused with a confident, often religious, belief that British rule conferred order, law and progress upon supposedly backward peoples. Missionaries, explorers and reforming officials pressed forward not for dividends but in the conviction that they carried a civilising trust. Ideas of racial hierarchy, popularised after Darwin, hardened this sense of duty into a presumption of right. Public enthusiasm, fed by a popular press and an imperial culture of exhibitions and adventure, created political pressure that statesmen could not ignore. Decisions taken in Cairo or the Niger delta were framed and justified by these beliefs, which shaped what contemporaries thought possible and proper. To treat such ideas as mere decoration over economic motive is to underestimate how deeply they structured the imperial imagination.

Question: Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments in these three extracts are in relation to the motives behind the expansion of the British Empire in the later nineteenth century. [30 marks]

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