Question

Read the following passage regarding the historical debate over the 'Great Divergence,' then match each historian to the specific argument they advance.

The debate over the 'Great Divergence'—the phenomenon whereby Western Europe pulled ahead of Asia in economic productivity during the nineteenth century—has yielded several distinct schools of historical thought. Traditionalist scholars such as David Landes assert that the divergence was rooted in long-standing European institutional and cultural exceptionalism, particularly the protection of private property and a cultural propensity for scientific inquiry. Conversely, Kenneth Pomeranz challenges this Eurocentric model, arguing that core regions of Europe and China were remarkably similar in economic development until around 1800. For Pomeranz, it was Europe's fortuitous geographical access to abundant coal reserves and the extractive windfall of New World colonies that relaxed crucial ecological constraints, enabling industrialization.

Taking a more localized economic approach, Robert Allen contends that the initial spark for the Industrial Revolution was highly specific to Britain's unique price structure: only there were wages sufficiently high and coal sufficiently cheap to make the massive capital investments in early, inefficient mechanization profitable. Meanwhile, Andre Gunder Frank offers a macro-historical critique. Frank posits that the global economy was overwhelmingly Asia-centric until the late eighteenth century, and that Europe only managed to buy its way into this expanding Asian market by aggressively exploiting New World silver. In Frank's view, the West's ascendance was not the result of internal superiority, but a temporary reallocation of wealth driven by colonial plunder.