Question

Passage A
The standard narrative of the Industrial Revolution emphasizes the sudden, transformative impact of steam power and mechanized factories in late eighteenth-century Britain. This view, championed by early economic historians, posits a sharp rupture with the agrarian past, wherein technological breakthroughs rapidly rearranged social and economic structures. Within a few decades, traditional cottage industries were swept away, replaced by urban factories that vastly increased production capacity. This dramatic transition is presented as a technological triumph that unilaterally initiated modern economic growth, establishing a clear line of demarcation between the pre-industrial and industrial eras. Under this model, the steam engine was the prime mover, a sudden catalyst that dragged a stagnant, traditional society into the modern age.

Passage B
To understand the rise of modern industry, we must look beyond the dramatic narrative of steam and iron. The roots of industrialization were planted centuries earlier in the slow, incremental expansion of domestic trade networks and commercial agriculture. Long before the widespread adoption of the steam engine, British society was undergoing a gradual reorganization. Innovations in canal transport, regional specialization, and agricultural techniques created a highly integrated market economy that laid the necessary groundwork for later factory systems. Mechanization was not a sudden catalyst that disrupted a stagnant agrarian world, but rather the logical culmination of a long-term evolutionary process of commercial development that was already well underway.

Based on the passages, the authors of Passage A and Passage B disagree most directly about which of the following aspects of the Industrial Revolution?