This obligatory course is the only course offered in the third trimester. Students take this course while they research and write their final paper. The theme rotates. Each year either a resident or visiting professor chooses a subject that is topical because of its historical relevance to contemporary events (i.e. The Arab Spring, the Economic Crisis, Global Warming) or because it is has generated a particularly lively debate within the field of World History (i.e. the Great Divergence, Imperial Rises and Declines, Inequality).

We will examine relations between Europe, America and Africa based primarily on the phenomenon of Atlantic slave trade and the development of various plantation economies in the Caribbean basin, Brazil and the southern United States of America. We will focus especially on the effects of slave trafficking in Africa, the various forms of resistance shown by slaves themselves, the impact of slave trade and Atlantic slavery on European economies and their industrialisation, as well as on the main players and factors contributing to the abolition of slavery. We will do so on a broad epoch framework covering five centuries (15th-19th) centring on the dynamics and interactions between various societies across the Atlantic Ocean, or to put it another way, between the old African and European worlds and the new American world.