Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (2004). A careful study of the origins of Wahhabi Islam and its subsequent development.

Patricia Buckley Ebrey et al., East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (2005). A broad survey by major scholars in the field.

Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800 (2003). Explores the two-way exchange of ideas between Europe and Asia in the early modern era.

Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science (2003). A fascinating and controversial explanation as to why modern science arose in the West rather than in China or the Islamic world.

Úrsula de Jesús, The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic (2004). A scholarly introduction by Nancy E. van Deusen places Úrsula in a broader context.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009). A masterful exploration of global Christianity with extensive coverage of the early modern era.

Deva Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (2011). A fascinating account of a major breakthrough in the Scientific Revolution.

Internet Modern History Sourcebook, “The Scientific Revolution,” http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook09.html. A collection of primary-source documents dealing with the breakthrough to modern science in Europe.