History and Politics

History and politics is a combination that reflects the reality that understanding political life requires historical depth, and that history cannot be properly understood without attention to the political structures and power relations that have shaped it. History develops the capacity to read the past critically, using primary and secondary sources, evaluating competing interpretations, and situating events within their broader contexts. Political science provides frameworks for analysing power, governance, ideology, and political behaviour, and for comparing how different political systems have developed and functioned across time and place.

Together, the two disciplines offer a particularly rigorous preparation for understanding how the contemporary world came to be the way it is.

At the University of Exeter, this three-year full-time programme can be studied at the main Exeter campus. The combination of history and politics here allows you to range widely across periods and geographies, examining the development of states and empires, the history of political ideas, the dynamics of revolution and reform, and the structures of modern democratic and non-democratic regimes. You will work with a range of source types, develop skills in historical analysis and political argumentation, and engage with methodological debates about how we know what we know about the past and about political life.

The programme includes a sandwich year, a year abroad, and a work placement, offering considerable professional and international experience within a three-year structure. These options allow you to spend time in a study or professional environment outside Exeter, deepening your understanding of politics and history through direct engagement with different contexts.

History and politics graduates are highly regarded across a range of careers because the combination of analytical rigour, historical knowledge, political understanding, and clear communication is genuinely rare and valuable. The civil service, journalism, law, politics, international organisations, think tanks, research, education, the charitable sector, and management consultancy all draw regularly on graduates from this field. Postgraduate study in history, political science, international relations, or area studies is a natural progression for those with research or specialist career ambitions.