Causation is the relationship between causes and effects — the attempt to explain why historical events happened as they did. Historical causation is complex because events typically have multiple causes at different levels: immediate triggers, medium-term conditions, and long-term structures. Analytical writing about causation requires you to distinguish between these levels and assess their relative importance.
Types of cause
- Proximate causes are the immediate triggers — the events that directly precipitated the outcome. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a proximate cause of the First World War. Hitler’s appointment by Hindenburg was a proximate cause of the Nazi dictatorship.
- Structural causes are the deeper conditions that made an outcome possible or likely — the underlying tensions, weaknesses, or forces that created the conditions for the proximate cause to have the effect it did. The systemic instabilities of European alliance politics were a structural cause of the war. Weimar’s constitutional weaknesses and the Depression were structural causes of the Nazi breakthrough.
- Necessary vs sufficient causes. A necessary cause is one without which the outcome could not have occurred. A sufficient cause is one that, by itself, would have been enough to produce the outcome. Most historical events have necessary but not sufficient individual causes — each factor was required, but none alone would have produced the result.
How to use it in an answer
Questions that ask ‘why did X happen’ or ‘how far was X the result of Y’ are causation questions. The most sophisticated answers distinguish between levels of causation rather than simply listing factors. ‘The proximate cause was elite miscalculation, but this operated within structural conditions — constitutional weakness, economic collapse — that made authoritarian breakthrough probable regardless of the specific mechanism’ is a more analytically precise argument than ‘there were several causes including A, B, and C’.
Further reading: Significance · Continuity and Change · Fall of Weimar
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