Mmm, in that regard, there is one single resource absolutely worth reading. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". Diamond is a scientist who takes a rather unconventional approach history. He asks, not so much, "what happened"? As "why did it happen this way".
The heart of his question  is - how did Europeans manage to colonize almost the entire world - no other group had ever achieved colonization on such a scale. They colonized 4 entire continents ! 
What was it that allowed them to have achieve that ? And he sets out from the basis that it was NOT any kind of inherent superiority of either the people or the culture (as he put it: if you think the primitive living people of Papua New Guinea aren't resourceful, intelligent and inventive you haven't met them).
And he comes up with an interesting answer: geography. 
TBC.