Someone else mentioned my favorite anthropologist, David Graeber, and I’m working through that book right now!
Another anthropologist, Eric Wolf, wrote Europe and the People Without History, which you might also find interesting.
It covers the time span you’re looking for, and focuses on how global, political-economic trajectories were shaped by the “people without history” (the colonized).
I wrote almost all of my grad school work in Vim and Emacs/Evil, in a non-compsci field! It was fantastic for editing, and I used pandoc to automate proper formatting, citations, and bibliographies for my papers and thesis. 10/10 would recommend to someone who is tech savvy or has a tangential interest in programming.