Board: Edexcel | Option: 36.1 | Paper: 3 (Thematic Study)
About this option
Edexcel 36.1 traces the long history of popular agitation and parliamentary change in Britain from the radical movements of the 1780s through to the achievement of universal adult suffrage in 1928. The option spans the age of Peterloo and Chartism, the great Reform Acts of the 19th century, and the suffragette campaigns of the early 20th century — asking students to assess how protest related to reform across this 150-year arc, and whether parliamentary change was driven by pressure from below or conceded by elites for their own reasons.
Key themes
- Radicalism and the state in the 1780s–1810s: Corresponding Societies, the impact of the French Revolution, and repression
- Peterloo (1819) and the Six Acts: the limits of protest
- The Great Reform Act (1832): causes, content, and debate over its significance
- Chartism (1838–57): aims, organisation, peak moments, and failure
- The Second Reform Act (1867) and the Third Reform Act (1884)
- The suffragette and suffragist movements: WSPU, NUWSS, and competing strategies
- The Representation of the People Acts (1918, 1928) and the achievement of universal suffrage
What the exam asks
Paper 3 Thematic Study questions require sustained argument about change and continuity across the full chronological range. Strong answers make direct comparisons between phases of the period and sustain a clear line of argument across the whole timeframe rather than narrating events in sequence.
Historiography
The history of reform in this period has been contested between those who see popular pressure as its principal driver and those who emphasise the calculations of the political elite. E.P. Thompson’s framework, which foregrounded working-class agency and the political mobilisation of ordinary people, has been central to the field since The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s influence is visible in studies of Chartism by historians such as Dorothy Thompson, who emphasised the breadth and radicalism of the movement. The revisionist challenge came from Gareth Stedman Jones, who read Chartism’s language as fundamentally political and constitutionalist rather than a direct expression of class interest — a reading that minimised the continuity between Chartism and later labour politics. On parliamentary reform, Boyd Hilton and Philip Harling have argued that the 1832 settlement is better understood as elite crisis management — designed to stabilise property and pre-empt revolution — than as a response to popular pressure. This sits in tension with older accounts that credited the extra-parliamentary agitation of 1830–32 as decisive. The suffragette historiography has its own internal division: historians of the WSPU (Sandra Stanley Holton, June Purvis) have debated whether militant tactics hastened or delayed enfranchisement, while the constitutional NUWSS tradition (represented in Martin Pugh’s work) has been reassessed as more strategically sophisticated than previously acknowledged. Recent scholarship has also emphasised the transnational dimensions of suffrage politics and the role of colonial subjects excluded from the 1918 and 1928 settlements.
Return to the Edexcel resources hub
Interpretations pack — coming September 2026
A teaching pack for this option is in development, covering all core historiographical debates. It will include named historians with argument summaries, paired comparison tasks built to Edexcel mark scheme logic, and provenance analysis prompts — all in a downloadable PDF.
£9.99 per pack · Available September 2026
