I have just finished reading Late Victorian Holocausts El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World It is an execellent book . Some passages in chapter 8 are not easy and require some scientific knowledge of the field, but most of the book is a very good read.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51