IB History Paper 2 Past Papers & Drilling: Five Original World History Essays with Model Answers

Question 1

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the two rulers used the same skeleton of control (one-party rule, secret police, mass organisations, media control) but drew legitimacy from opposite sources – race and revenge in one case, anti-imperialism and social reform in the other.
(1) Similarity – organisation and surveillance: after the 1933 Enabling Act in Germany rival parties were banned and the Gestapo and SS ran repression; in Cuba the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (1960) built a street-level network of informers. Both created official youth movements (Hitler Youth; the Cuban communist youth league) to capture the next generation.
(2) Similarity – external threat: Germany invoked the humiliation of Versailles and the stab-in-the-back claim; Cuba invoked the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the US embargo.
(3) Difference – legalisation and institutionalisation: Germany wrote racial discrimination into law (Nuremberg Laws, 1935) and linked rearmament to the economy through the Four Year Plan (1936); Cuba built support through social reform (the 1961 literacy campaign) and a 1976 constitution, then tied its economy to Soviet subsidies by joining Comecon in 1972.
(4) Difference – the leader’s image: Germany concentrated authority in a personal leadership principle; Cuba mobilised around the guerrilla-hero image of the revolution.
Judgement: the methods were structurally alike while legitimacy came from different sources, so an assessment of how power was kept must weigh persuasion as well as terror.

Question 2

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the settlements created the grievance, but the war needed the Depression, appeasement and the collapse of collective security as well; the treaties were a necessary background, not a sufficient cause.
(1) The settlements did leave resentment: Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the reparations bill fixed in 1921, an army capped at 100,000, the demilitarised Rhineland and territorial losses; the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 turned reparations into hyperinflation and a middle-class trauma.
(2) But the 1920s show the settlement was manageable: the Dawes Plan (1924) rescheduled reparations, Locarno (1925) accepted the western borders and Germany joined the League in 1926 – with political will the treaties could be lived with.
(3) The decisive push came after 1929: the Depression raised unemployment and extremist politics, the 1932 disarmament conference failed, the 1935 Anglo-German naval agreement, the unopposed remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Munich agreement of 1938 dismantled the treaty limits one by one.
(4) Structural defects mattered too: the United States stayed out of the League, the League had no military enforcement, and Britain and France disagreed over eastern Europe, so collective security failed in the 1930s.
Judgement: the treaties supplied motive and pretext while appeasement and economic crisis supplied opportunity and time; blaming 1939 on the settlements alone ignores the detente of the 1920s and the political choices of the 1930s.

Question 3

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument: the blockade was the turning point at which the Cold War moved from friction inside a wartime alliance to institutionalised bipolar confrontation, but it was also the product of earlier structural conflict rather than the starting point.
(1) It made the split public: after the western zones introduced a new currency in June 1948, the Soviet Union blocked land access to West Berlin (24 June); the West answered with an airlift that ran until 12 May 1949, carrying well over two million tons on some 277,000 flights.
(2) It institutionalised the confrontation: NATO was founded in April 1949 and the Federal Republic (May) and the German Democratic Republic (October) followed the same year – occupied zones became military alliances and two states.
(3) Earlier causes matter too (counter-argument): ideological hostility, disagreement at Yalta and Potsdam, Soviet demands for a security buffer, atomic diplomacy after 1945, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947 and the founding of Cominform – the blockade was where those tensions surfaced.
(4) Later crises continued the same logic: the Korean War (1950) extended the Cold War into Asia and drove rearmament, and the Cuban missile crisis (1962) took the world to the edge of nuclear war, showing Berlin was the first peak rather than the whole story.
Judgement: the significance of the blockade is that it fixed the split – it turned political disagreement into an irreversible European order, which makes it a turning point, not an origin.

Question 4

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument (India, 1947): success came from three forces meeting – local organisation, the post-war weakening of the colonial power and the international environment – with local political organisation the necessary condition and the international setting the accelerator.
(1) Local organisation and mass mobilisation: the Congress party’s grassroots network from the 1920s and the Quit India movement of 1942 turned independence into a mass demand; the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and the grievances of demobilised soldiers cost the colonial state its reliable force.
(2) Financial and manpower exhaustion in Britain: the war left Britain deeply indebted (borrowing from the United States in 1946) and the cost of garrisoning and administering South Asia unsustainable, so the 1946 Cabinet Mission and the 1947 Mountbatten plan negotiated transfer rather than retention.
(3) The international environment: the Atlantic Charter (1941) and the UN Charter (1945) made self-determination a principle, and Cold War competition pushed both superpowers to press the colonial powers, raising the political cost of holding on.
(4) Counter-argument and comparison: the international setting alone did not deliver independence – French Algeria faced the same post-1945 world yet fought a long war from 1954 to 1962; the difference was whether a local movement could organise continuously and win international legitimacy.
Judgement: local organisation converted opportunity into outcome, so the answer must separate necessary conditions from accelerators.

Question 5

Model answer plan (15 marks)
Line of argument (Britain): the long-run net effect was positive, but the costs fell on the generation of 1800-1850 and the gains only became general after 1850, so the answer has to be periodised.
(1) The harm, 1800-1850: long factory hours, widespread child labour, overcrowded back-to-back housing and polluted water; the New Poor Law of 1834 treated poverty as personal failure; famine and cholera in the 1840s pushed urban death rates up, and cyclical unemployment drove workers straight into destitution.
(2) The gains, through legislation and public health: the Factory Act of 1833 created inspectors and limited child labour, the Ten Hours Act of 1847 cut hours, the Public Health Act of 1848 and the London sewerage works of 1858-1875 reduced epidemic risk, and trade unions gained firmer legal standing in the 1880s.
(3) Long-run material trends: after 1850 real wages rose continuously – historians put the gain by 1900 somewhere between roughly thirty and eighty per cent depending on the baseline and region – while food prices fell on free trade and cheaper transport, widening what a worker could buy.
(4) Counter-argument: a net gain cannot erase distributional questions: wealth concentrated with capital and landowners, and families still depended on everyone working. Isolate the 1840s and the verdict reverses.
Judgement: industrialisation changed who benefited and when; the whole-century balance is positive, but the answer must concede that the first fifty years were paid for by the first factory generation.