The era we’re still inside.

Late-20th-century technology accelerated everything. Container shipping (1956 onward) cut shipping costs ~95%, making global supply chains economical. Commercial jet aircraft (1958) shrank the world. The internet (commercialized 1990s) connected information instantly and globally; smartphones (2007 onward) put it in everyone’s pocket. Biotechnology revolutionized agriculture (Green Revolution, GMOs) and medicine (recombinant DNA, gene therapy, mRNA vaccines). Each advance compounded the others.

Antibiotics (penicillin, 1928 industrial production 1940s) and vaccination programs nearly eliminated some infectious diseases (smallpox eradicated 1980; polio nearly so). Public health—sanitation, clean water, child immunization—doubled life expectancy in the 20th century. But new pandemics emerged: HIV/AIDS (~40 million dead since the 1980s); COVID-19 (~7 million confirmed dead since 2020). Antibiotic resistance threatens to roll back gains. The medical revolution is real but incomplete and unequal.

Industrial-era CO₂ emissions have driven measurable global warming since the late 20th century. Effects: more extreme weather, sea-level rise, ecosystem disruption, climate refugees. Responses: international agreements (Kyoto 1997, Paris 2015), shifts to renewables (solar, wind), debates over nuclear power. The transition is uneven and contested—rich countries built their wealth on fossil fuels and now ask poorer countries to skip them. Climate change is the era’s defining environmental fact.

The Bretton Woods system (1944) set up the IMF, World Bank, and dollar gold standard, organizing the postwar Western economy. The shift to free trade accelerated through GATT (1947) and the WTO (1995). Manufacturing migrated from rich-world unionized workers to low-wage countries (Mexico via NAFTA 1994; China after WTO accession 2001). China’s rise—from 4% of global GDP in 1990 to ~18% in 2024—was the era’s biggest economic story. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the fragility of integrated finance.

Discontent with the global order produced multiple movements. Anti-globalization protests (Seattle 1999, Genoa 2001) targeted the WTO and IMF. NGOs (Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch) built transnational advocacy networks. From the 2010s onward, populist nationalism rose: Brexit (2016), Trump’s 2016 victory, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary. The pendulum has swung between integration and reaction; current politics is the swing.

Global culture is partly homogenizing (Hollywood, K-pop, Premier League soccer, English as global lingua franca) and partly diversifying (regional revivals, religious resurgence, digital subcultures). Religious pluralism: Pentecostalism’s explosion in Africa and Latin America; political Islam’s post-1979 prominence; Buddhism in the West. Anglosphere consumer culture spreads with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but also gets adapted everywhere it lands. Identity politics—national, ethnic, religious, gendered—is the era’s new political idiom.

On a continuity-and-change FRQ for the 20th–21st century: CHANGES include scale of state, mass democracy, decolonization, women’s public rights, technological speed, climate as political fact, end of European hegemony. CONTINUITIES include great-power rivalry (now U.S.–China), commodity dependence in much of the Global South, ethnic and religious conflict, gender hierarchies in much of the world, capitalist organization of production. The 20th century broke many things, but not everything.