If you are planning on reading a "history of the world/how we got here" book, my recommendation is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--For Now, which has a pretty awful title but also has the advantage of being written by an actual historian/archaeologist. It basically focuses on "the West" (defined as Europe and the Middle East) and "the East" (defined pretty much as China) exclusively, so if you are interested in India or the conquest of the Americas it won't give you too much, but it does do a very good job of synthesizing an enormous amount of information, and its bibliography is quite up to date on a rather startling array of disciplines. Far from perfect, of course, but I don't think there is anything comparable and better on the market (it is also possibly the least popular of the "universal histories", which is sort of depressing).

I haven't actually read Acemoglu's book, but I did read the chapter on Rome, which I found fairly awful. Given that writing a history of Rome is comparatively rather easier than writing about, say, the Maya or the Neolithic Revolution, I would suggest reading carefully.