The second volume of Immanuel Wallerstein’s major work “The World-System of Modernity” is dedicated to key milestones in the history of the capitalist world-economy of the 17th - first third of the 18th centuries: short-term Dutch hegemony, the first stages of the struggle for hegemony between England and France, the emergence of new rising semi-peripheral powers (Sweden, Prussia, Russia). Contrary to the prevailing idea of the “long” 17th century as a period of “refeudalization” and “seniorial reaction,” the author demonstrates that in reality the “crisis of the 17th century” was a time of consolidation and strengthening of capitalist forces, which prepared the subsequent stage of a new large-scale expansion of capitalism at the turn of the 18th century —XIX centuries. The translation is based on the 2011 reissue, which contains a new preface in which Wallerstein offers a brief theoretical summary of the world-system approach through the prism of the concept of “hegemony.”