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.
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