Thanks for the recommendations! I have a holiday coming up so it's the perfect time to look into them. I recently read the Lessons of History by Durant for a beautiful condensed view encompassing much of human history.
Another book that influenced this article but which I for some reason didn't cite is Joe Henrich's "The WEIRDest people in the world". It's a great account on the peculiarities of the Western psyche, how it developed in the middle Ages and how we fail to notice many of these peculiarities given almost all of psychology studies are performed on Western educated college students, which are seen as somehow representing human nature.