The main argument of my long essay is that different explanations for the Great Divergence lead to different historical narratives, which might in turn affect the current global environment, institutions and policy making. The answer to how severe global inequality happened - whether quick economic development was “natural” for western cultures, or whether it was due to exploitation of colonies, or merely a historical coincidence - might be a determinant for how this inequality will be interpreted and solved in the future. The essay will outline the three main schools that describe the “European miracle” - the cultural, the New World History and the Political Economic History, as well as aim to attribute each referenced academic (including Pomeranz, Brenner, Bin Wong, Weber, Wallerstein, and others) into one of the three, explaining why. It will also focus on the methodologic and historiographic issues of studying the Great Divergence, for instance complications surrounding the GDP which is usually used as the main measure to show economic divergence between “the West and the Rest”, in order to encourage the reader to critically assess such economic indicators. Another issue that will be noted is that quantitative research has been done from a eurocentric perspective, an implication of which is that there is a lack of historical statistical data on other regions, especially until they were “discovered” by European Empires. The body of the essay will be structured into four main parts, one for each school and the fourth one for methodological and historiographic issues of studying the Great Divergence. The research done so far has been the analysis and assessment of secondary sources, and I am currently searching for more primary sources that would be useful to exemplify the debate.