Although interesting, it is absolutely exhausting to read. The prose is stiff, boring, unimaginative and unclear, especially the latter is of course horrible for a non-fiction book. The consequence of discussing the history of the world is that the author is, of course, forced to jump around between regions when relating historical tendencies and developments, but the way in which it is done is often awkward, which stunts the flow of reading further and further until you're just lost in a wall of statement upon statement upon fact upon observation upon statistic.