Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #411

In her 2004 monograph, historian Elena Rostova evaluates the economic policies of the Late Byzantine Empire. Traditionally, scholars have cited the debasement of the *hyperpyron* (the gold coin) as the primary catalyst for the empire’s final commercial collapse. Rostova, however, dedicates her first three chapters to an exhaustive analysis of the shifting agrarian tax burdens in Anatolia. By demonstrating that agricultural output plummeted decades prior to the currency's devaluation, Rostova frames the debasement not as an instigating blunder, but as a desperate, albeit ineffective, symptom of an already terminal fiscal disease. Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?