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There's no easy way of saying this: the carefree days of summer are over. But though pencils are being sharpened, and unsuspecting children squeezed into uncomfortable new uniforms, it's not all bad... A History of the World is back.

With days to go until the series starts on Radio 4 again, I negotiated my way into the inner sanctum - the scripting room - to find out from Barrie Cook, one of the principle curatorial brains that support Neil MacGregor to produce the series, what we're going to hear about in the next six weeks.

The answer is, after 70 programmes and around two million years, we'll hear about how the modern world we live in was made.

Barrie started off by explaining how the final set of objects - from the signature of a sultan who went by the name of 'the magnificent', to a credit card - took us into an unprecedented age. Ìý

In the first week back we start off in the fifteenth century, which is the last moment when the world is divided into regions, discreet areas like the Americas, Europe, Africa, where different great powers don't necessarily know about each other. By the second week everyone knows everyone else and it's chaos! Global money, trade, exploitation, and massive movement of people, populations and goods like tea, sugar and porcelain.

For Barrie the pieces of eight is particularly well-placed to tell this story:

It's when we become global, and organised for global interaction on a massive scale, for the first time. Everything else comes from it. It describes the uncontrollable nature of money and what it can do to societies.

Telling a story of relatively recent times has its difficulties and differences to those earlier in the series.

A lot of the stories we are telling are not finished. We are often providing a historical insight into something that is still being played out today.

Let's take The Wave, a print made by Japanese artist Hokusai in the nineteenth century, which is still one of the most popular and well-known images in world art. Yet this print also provides a window onto an East Asian country that would emerge as a rival to the dominant industrialised empires of Europe and the USA at the turn of the twentieth century. Fast-forward 100 years and East Asia's seat at the top table of global economic and industrial powers is well and truly secured.

Yet at the same time, exploring recent history has its advantages. As Barrie explained:

We don't have to go into the basics as with the third millennium BC where so much of the history we were telling was unknown to most listeners. We can concentrate on offering different perspectives, and a lot of the stories we are telling are the unexpected ones.

As ever in A History of the World, the programmes aim to approach the past in ways that might surprise many of us.

So, through the brass plaque from Benin you'll hear how the first relationships between Europe and African powers were about trade - not the pattern we often expect. You'll discover how Islamic Indonesia absorbed ancient Hindu traditions into Java's shadow puppet theatre. Plus, through a sixteenth century map, we'll reveal how Spanish Catholicism and local religious traditions were integrated in colonial Mexico.

As we trace the recent past right up to the present day, some of the objects featured in the coming weeks will be unusual, rare and of great complexity. But many others will be more familiar - credit card, tea set, bank note, penny - the kind of common, ubiquitous type of object many of us use everyday in the modern and globalised world they helped to make.

• A History of the World in 100 Objects returns to Radio 4 at 9:45am Monday 13 September.
• The photo of the girl looking at the globe is by and it's used .Ìý