ABSTRACT
The modern world was forged during the long 1980s. During this transitional decade, the rapid and wide-ranging economic reforms in liberal democracies drove on a transformative process that shaped global politics, economics and society. The emergence of a more aggressive, globalised form of capitalism greatly influenced people’s lives around the world. Some benefited from the growing wealth of the 1980s while others suffered from the widening gap between rich and poor. Economic growth in Britain and the US was stronger than it had been in the 1970s, but, measured by Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s own terms, the neoliberal turn failed as much as it succeeded. By 1989, global politics, economics and societies had been transformed by a wave of democracy that washed away many dictatorships and left others too unstable to continue as the next decade began.
