Chronology is the floor, not the building
You need the timeline — you cannot argue about causes without knowing the order of events. But knowing it earns you almost nothing on its own, and most revision stops exactly there, at the point where the marks begin.
What the marks are actually for
- Causation. Not what caused it — *which* cause mattered most, and why you'd rank them that way. The ranking is the argument.
- Evidence. Specific, deployable, precise. A named source, a figure, a quotation. Vague gestures at 'economic factors' score nothing.
- Historiography. What do historians disagree about, and why? The disagreement is frequently the real content of the question.
- Judgment. An answer that surveys both sides and refuses to conclude sits below one that argues and commits. The top band nearly always requires a judgment, and most answers never make one.
Revise arguments, not events
Build, for each likely question, an argument: a thesis, three supporting points with specific evidence attached, and the strongest counter-argument along with your answer to it. That structure is what you'll write in the exam, and it is what you should be practising — see the essay assistant, which is built to attack your thesis rather than write it.
Then card the evidence — dates, figures, quotations — because a beautifully structured argument with no specifics in it is a low-band answer. Space it so the detail is there when you need it.