In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond develops a theory for why Europe and Asia developed vast, powerful civilizations, but Africa and the Americas did not.
In Africa, the co-evolution of primates/humans and other life resulted in that other life becoming extremely dangerous to humans. My impression is that if Africa were the only continent, humans would still be living in caves, because nature had enough time to adapt. Even today, we do not have the technology to tame the wildlife and diseases of Africa, nor will most crops grow there. So the ability to escape the continent would have been the first “external gate”.
In the Americas, the geography and north-south orientation of the continents, as well as the lack of work animals and crops suitable for agriculture, gated development until much later than Europe and Asia. Corn took a very long time to go from being an itty bitty little thing to a crop capable of supporting civilization.
Guns, Germs and Steel is a pretty terrible attempt at a theory. The largest East-West band of climatically similar areas isn't Eurasia, it's the Sahel in Africa, which incidentally does have quite a bit of native agriculture, including a plant extremely similar to corn called sorghum. The near east where European agriculture originated was actually a complicated patchwork of microclimates leading up to the neolithic, which cultures like the natufians essentially arbitraged. If we go down that pathway you end up at something like the vertical archipelago model, developed to understand Andean agriculture. Corn also wasn't the first crops domesticated in the Americas. Squashes were, around the same time as the near east was experimenting with vetches (because cereal grains hadn't caught on yet there either).
So on and so forth. Diamond didn't put a lot of effort into making his theory actually fit the evidence, he just wrote an engaging book.
Could you suggest any good books which go over this kind of global history? Until now I’d also accepted Diamond’s work as the leading theory for global inequality, since it was taught in school and I never looked into it further.
There are few good books of this kind because it is so remarkably hard to construct grand narratives rigorously. So you get people like diamond stepping in it.
Braudel is a combo of geographic and economic history that is still respected (if old).
There's no narrative of world history that's universally (or even widely) accepted by all scholars. Many reject the idea that there's even a single unifying explanation.
With that said, if you're interested in a relatively neutral world history, I'd recommend the Cambridge World History. Failing that, you could do worse than Wikipedia.
I suspect you won't find that answer satisfying because it deliberately avoids "explaining global inequality", which no single book can do. A short answer that is definitively not the explanation, but most would accept as a major part of an explanation is colonialism. Europeans enjoyed some early successes redirecting existing institutions like those of the reconquista into colonial ventures. Those ventures extracted vast amounts of wealth that colonial powers were able to leverage via luck, historical happenstance, and the institutions evolved to maintain those ventures into a transformation from relatively poor backwaters in the 12th century to an extremely wealthy set of nations. Basically, they snowballed. Even this admittedly abstract answer is too reductionist and misses a lot of narratives many academics would be quick to point out. For example, Machines as the Measure of Men makes the argument that we observe great inequality in part because post-colonialism we've basically defined inequality as "differences from the Western model" rather than by any objective reality of poverty.
In the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond develops a theory for why Europe and Asia developed vast, powerful civilizations, but Africa and the Americas did not.
In Africa, the co-evolution of primates/humans and other life resulted in that other life becoming extremely dangerous to humans. My impression is that if Africa were the only continent, humans would still be living in caves, because nature had enough time to adapt. Even today, we do not have the technology to tame the wildlife and diseases of Africa, nor will most crops grow there. So the ability to escape the continent would have been the first “external gate”.
In the Americas, the geography and north-south orientation of the continents, as well as the lack of work animals and crops suitable for agriculture, gated development until much later than Europe and Asia. Corn took a very long time to go from being an itty bitty little thing to a crop capable of supporting civilization.