British History KP PMS Paper I 2025

KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION
WRITTEN EXAMINATION FOR THE POSTS OF PMS OFFICER / AETO BPS-17
(2025)
BRITISH HISTORY (PAPER-I)
Time Allowed: 03 Hours Total Marks: 100
Note:- Attempt any five questions.
Q.No.1 Was the Norman Conquest of 1066 a simple dynastic change or a revolutionary event? Argue for or against the proposition that it fundamentally remade English society. (20)
Q.No.2 To what extent was Thomas Hobbes’s grim depiction of the state of nature as a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” a direct reflection of the political and social breakdown he witnessed during the English Civil War? Analyze whether his proposed solution—an absolute sovereign—was a logical remedy for the specific ills that afflicted 17th-century England. (20)
Q.No.3 Analyze the Glorious Revolution as a turning point in British political history. Was it a radical revolution that established popular sovereignty, or a conservative settlement designed by the aristocracy to secure their power and property while establishing the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy? (20)
Q.No.4 Assess the impact of the French Revolution on British domestic politics. How did the perceived threat of revolutionary ideas lead to a period of government repression (e.g. the Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’) that stifled the reformist movement for a generation? (20)
Q.No.5 Assess the claim that Great Britain, not the continental powers, was the true victor of the Napoleonic Wars. To what extent did the conflict eliminate Britain’s main commercial rival (French) and secure its global maritime, colonial, and industrial supremacy for the next century? (20)
Q.No.6 Evaluate the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Did the era primarily represent progress, leading to long-term improvements in the standard of living and the rise of a new middle class, or was it an age of exploitation defined by the misery of the urban working class? (20)
Q.No.7 Assess the primary cause of the American War of Independence (1775–1783). Was the conflict an irreconcilable clash of political ideologies over liberty and representation, or was it fundamentally an economic dispute driven by British mercantilist policies and colonial resistance to taxation? (20)
Q.No.8 Evaluate the Great Reform Act of 1832 not as an end-point, but as the direct catalyst for the Chartist movement. Did the Act’s deliberate exclusion of the working classes make a more radical, class-based politics inevitable in the following decades? (20)