History and Politics

History and Politics is a combination that has long made intellectual sense: politics without history lacks context, and history without political analysis often lacks explanatory power. At the University of Edinburgh, this MA programme runs over four years of full-time study and includes a year abroad, allowing you to bring an international dimension to your understanding of both disciplines. Edinburgh's Scottish degree structure gives you additional breadth in your first two years before you specialise more deeply, and the programme sits at the meeting point of the university's strong humanities and social science traditions.

Studying history at this level means learning to read the past critically rather than simply memorising it. You will work with primary sources, evaluate competing interpretations, and develop the habit of situating events within broader political, economic, and social structures. The politics component introduces you to the core questions of the discipline: how power is organised and legitimised, how governments form and fail, how ideologies shape policy, and how international relations are conducted.

Together, the two subjects reinforce each other. Historical study teaches you to be sceptical of simple narratives, while political theory gives you frameworks for understanding why institutions and movements behave as they do. The year abroad offers you the opportunity to study in a different academic and cultural environment, deepening your comparative perspective in ways that are hard to replicate in a single institution.

This degree develops a set of transferable skills that are genuinely in demand: the ability to assemble and assess evidence, construct well-reasoned arguments, write clearly under pressure, and engage with complexity without oversimplifying. These are qualities valued across public life, and graduates move into a wide range of careers. Politics, public policy, and the civil service are natural destinations, as are journalism, international development, law, and diplomacy.

Many graduates go on to postgraduate study, including master's degrees and doctorates in history, politics, international relations, or area studies. Others move into the private sector, where the analytical and written communication skills developed in this programme are consistently sought after.