The present article is an attempt to understand the multiple phenomena that characterized the post-war period and the dynamics and forces that have led, since the 1970s, to the deep transformations that all of us have been undergoing. In the first section, we address the main aspects that delimited the advent of modernity and the consolidation of the capitalist world-system, emphasizing the great economic changes at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, as well as the decades of crisis in the first half of the past century. In the following four sections, the analysis focuses critically on the most important events throughout the trajectory of the global economy, from the post-war period to the present (the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century). We conclude with an assessment of contemporaneity, trying to emphasize the dilemmas that humanity will have to face ahead.
modern world-system; urbanization; hegemony crisis; financial globalization; productive restructuring