History (Online Learning) MSc

The University of Edinburgh is a World Top 30 University (QS World University Rankings 2025).

We aim to provide a Programme that will result in an advanced qualification valued and respected by many employers. Many choose to take this degree for personal satisfaction and to further their study of a discipline close to their hearts, while others are interested in long-term academic careers and consider the MSc as preparation for a PhD. The combination of skills training, specialised seminars, and independent research provides you with transferable skills that will be beneficial whatever path you choose.

Graduates work in related areas such as education (though additional training may be required), museums, policy think tanks, national and international civil services, non-governmental organisations, galleries, libraries and historic trusts while others build their transferable skills to enter business, media, public administration or marketing.

You can take this programme at your own pace and can complete it in a period of one to six years. You can exit the programme at any stage with the qualification you have earned which is determined by the number of credits successfully achieved at the required level. We will assess you through a combination of:

• coursework
• discussion forum tasks
• source reviews
• article reviews
• recordings of oral presentations

To complete the MSc you will complete two compulsory courses and select a further four options from a wide range on offer, followed by independent research in the form of a supervised dissertation.

Many students balance their studies alongside other commitments and the programme’s flexible structure supports this, allowing part-time students to take up to two fallow semesters, in which you remain on the programme but do not register for courses.

Compulsory courses

• Historical Research: Approaches to History
• Historical Research: Skills and Sources

Option courses previously offered include those listed below. Option courses change from year to year and those available when you start your studies may be different from those shown in the list:

• Empire or Continent?: British Foreign Policy in the Era of the Great War
• The Lords of the Isles: Clan Donald, c.1336 - c.1545
• The Closest of Enemies: Cuban-American Relations 1898-2014
• Race, Religion, and Ridicule: The American South from Reconstruction to World War I
• The Contemporary Theory of War
• Myth and the History of Scholarship in Early Modern Europe
• Theories of Empire in the Early Modern Period
• Debating Marriage Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages
• Gender, Empire, and Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Perspectives from the Wider World
• An Imperial Game? Cricket, Culture & Society
• Modern Latin American History
• The Holocaust
• The Trial of the Templars
• Athens of the North - The Origins and Ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment
• Willingly to War? The Origins of the First World War
• Consensus to Thatcherism: Government and Politics in Post-War Britain
• The American Civil War and Reconstruction
• Ideology and Politics in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Space
• Seeking 'Japan' in a Westernizing World: Revolution, Romance and Imperialism 1868-1945
• British Empires, 1601-1948