Doesn't sit well with me because that competitive european colonial era was a lot more complicated than Pugh describes.
I hope Pugh's book discusses the realities of the global rentier classes and the origins of globalization, because I would argue this is at the root of much of subsequent events.
England, Germany, Holland and France were all competing to colonize the globe in a militaristic fashion during this era, and their internal and external societies reflected that. The advent of fluid global capital unaligned to nation states - including the 1910 Jekyll Island 'Federal Reserve' invention in the USA - led to massive pressures on the parochial societies.
The semitic ethnic cleansing to create the predominantly Ashkenazi state of Israel was largely the result of British capitulation to the global financiers who orchestrated the Sykes Picant and Balfor treaties that enabled the state of Israel to be reinvented.
The punitive reparations on Germany after WW1 was largely seen as this same class extracting tribute from Germans ...and crucially the popular sentiment was that German society was being dominated and overrun with Jewish capital. These are obviously contentious issues but, just as the case now where the 1% who own the world's capital 'haven't taken out enough insurance to protect themselves from the rest' to paraphrase economist Mark Blyth, 'populism' ie people waking up unsatisfied with the way their societies are dominated and run, was a major motivator for change then and now.
Well over 100 million people died in WWII and billions were made by those same stateless rentier classes (who are of all ethnicities and religions, this isn't uniquely about Judaism).
The author's website