Histories of the Industrial Revolution typically privilege the textile factories of northern England as the engine of modernization. Historian Pia Mukherjee argues that this focus reflects an English-language archive bias rather than the actual distribution of industrial activity: silk-weaving operations in southern China during the same era operated at comparable scale and with comparable mechanization, but their records have been less accessible to most Western historians.
Which choice best describes the function of the second sentence in the text?
- A
It defines the term 'textile factory'.
- Bcheck_circle
It reframes the conventional history as a product of archive bias rather than historical reality.
- C
It introduces a different European nation.
- D
It restates the conventional history in different words.
Explanation
Mukherjee redirects the apparent geographic emphasis to a feature of the archives. B captures this reframing.