Question

Read the following passage. Which sentence explicitly states the author's overall thesis? (Enter only the sentence number, e.g., '2')

[1] The traditional historiography of the industrial revolution emphasizes the rapid adoption of steam power as the primary catalyst for economic transformation in nineteenth-century Britain. [2] Revisionist historians have rightly contested this monocausal narrative by highlighting the indispensable role of highly skilled artisanal labor in fabricating the early steam engines, noting that without precision engineering, such theoretical innovations would have remained economically inert. [3] Yet, both traditionalists and revisionists operate under the flawed assumption that the locus of industrial transformation was exclusively technological and mechanical. [4] In reality, the most fundamental driver of the British industrial revolution was not the deployment of new machinery or the refinement of artisanal skills, but rather the unprecedented structural reorganization of credit and capital markets that allowed such physical innovations to be commercialized at scale. [5] The emergence of provincial joint-stock banks provided the necessary liquidity to bridge the temporal gap between raw material acquisition and the sale of finished manufactured goods. [6] Consequently, the early textile magnates were able to decouple production volume from their immediate personal wealth, scaling their operations to meet global demand. [7] To focus strictly on the physical infrastructure of the factory system is thus to mistake the visible symptoms of economic modernization for its underlying financial engine.