For most of recorded history, the world's advanced agrarian economies - those of China's Yangzi delta, of northwestern Europe, of Japan and northern India - differed from one another far less than any of them differed from the industrial societies that a few would later become. The puzzle historians call the Great Divergence is why, beginning in the late eighteenth century, sustained per-capita growth took hold in a corner of Europe and not in the equally commercialized cores of Asia. An older explanation locates the answer deep in European exceptionalism: distinctive property rights, a culture congenial to inquiry, competitive states that could not suppress innovation. On this telling the divergence was long in the making, its causes traceable centuries before the factories appeared. The account is not baseless - Europe's fragmented polity did constrain predatory rulers - but its logic is suspect. It reads the outcome backward, selecting whatever earlier feature seems to prefigure the result and treating it as the cause, while ignoring that comparably favorable features can be found in the Asian cores. A revisionist school reverses the emphasis. Its proponents argue that around 1750 the leading regions of Europe and Asia stood at rough parity in life expectancy, market integration, and agricultural productivity, and that the divergence therefore requires a proximate cause, not an ancient one. Two candidates are advanced: the accident of coal deposits lying near England's manufacturing centers, which relaxed the energy constraint that a wood-fueled economy imposed, and the windfall of New World land and silver, which let Europe escape the ecological ceiling that a densely settled Asia continued to press against. The revisionist case is a salutary corrective to teleology, yet it risks a symmetrical error. By insisting on parity until the last moment, it can understate genuine differences in the institutions that determined how a windfall would be used. Coal near a manufacturing center is inert without the legal and financial arrangements that mobilize capital to exploit it; New World silver enriched Spain without industrializing it. The pertinent question is not whether Europe enjoyed advantages - every region enjoyed some - but whether its advantages were of a kind that compounded. Here a more discriminating position emerges. The divergence was neither foreordained by a millennium of European distinctiveness nor the product of geographic luck alone. It arose where contingent endowments met institutions capable of converting them into self-reinforcing growth - and such a conjunction, being contingent, might have occurred elsewhere or not at all. This position sacrifices the clean narratives that both predecessors offer. It cannot promise that the outcome was inevitable, nor that it was accidental; it holds that the outcome was possible, and became actual only through a coincidence of conditions that neither camp, fixated on a single kind of cause, was equipped to see whole. What it loses in tidiness it gains in fidelity to a record that stubbornly refuses to reward monocausal explanation.