The authors put the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals together in the book and I can see their reasoning for it. All three are geographically close, and existed during the same period. Although it made it easy to group these empires together, it also made it easy to mix them up. Overall I think it would have been better to split these three empires up more to focus on each one individually, instead of almost blending them all as one unit. All the names began to sound very similar, and it was hard to distinguish what was happening during respective time periods.
Overall, I think this period of global interactions was a good thing. The exchange of information is what lead to the cultural and economic revolutions which have shaped our society today. Although there are some obvious negatives, such as the mass enslavement of Africans and the essential extermination of many native peoples, I believe the good outweighs the bad. Before this time period, transportation was not advanced enough to really exoplore the entire world. People were largely restricted to their geographical region and what was available there. This is the first time period in which people began exploring an entire new continent, and in just a few hundred years the Americas became some of the most powerful nations in the world. Technology and transportation are what leads to innovation in my opinion. What makes advances happen so quickly today is the ability to transport ideas and supplies. If this revolutionary time period never happened, there might be no U.S.A. or even it could be argued there wouldn't be computers.