This sector contemplates the problem of the passage to modernity from the middle of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, with an emphasis on questions about slavery and the post-abolition world, the struggle for land, trade, and business, nation, citizenship, rights, culture, and identities.  Questions are examined through the following themes:

Culture and Society: the social history of culture, literature, theater, and music, intellectuals and popular culture, social thinking, history of reading, culture and cities, religiosity and festivities; political cultures and identities, slavery, abolition, immigration, ethnicities and inter-ethnic relations, race and racism, non-western societies and cultural diversity; families, genders, and sexualities, history of families and cultural history, gender relations and sexuality; historiography, theory, and methodology.

Economy and Society: rural and urban social movements, cities and popular protest, slave rebellions, peasantry and social movements, messianism and social banditry, the struggle for land and the agrarian question; trade and industry, the slave trade and Atlantic commerce, history of companies, business, traders and wealth, free labor, immigration, and slavery; agrarian history and social history, landholding structures and land use systems, social stratifications in the rural world, peasantry, slave and free labor, demography and social history;  historiography, theory, and methodology.

Politics and Society: