Policies that work in one place often do less, or something different, in another. A growing literature in development economics traces part of the difference to culture: to the norms and beliefs a policy meets when it arrives. Policies in turn reshape those norms. The workshop brings together economists and economic historians who study both directions of this relationship.

Sara Lowes of the University of California, San Diego, opens the day with a keynote, Culture at a Crossroads, drawing on her work with Natalie Bau and Eduardo Montero on culture, policy and economic development. Nine papers follow in four sessions:

• Geography, belief and social order: how the permeability of bedrock shaped human societies, and how beliefs about ancestors sustain high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa
• Identity, ethnicity and political voice: Bible translations and the origins of ethnic identity in Africa, the political legacy of women in the Italian Resistance, and why social classes diverge over trade policy
• Cultural change and persistence: the changing values of non-European migrants in Sweden, and chiefs’ authority over assets in rural Malawi
• Law, taxation and the legitimacy of the state: kinship intensity and state legitimacy, and illegitimate taxation in 40,000 colonial documents

LEAP’s Etienne Le Rossignol wrote the bedrock paper with Joseph Enguehard of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

The day ends at 18:00 with the eleventh LEAP Lecture, delivered by Warren Whatley of the University of Michigan. The workshop opens a series of events at STIAS: a two-day PhD workshop and a one-day workshop on AI and economic policy follow it.

In 1970 the economist Evsey Domar argued that where land is abundant and labour scarce, landowners who want to live off the work of others must tie workers to them by force. Whatley asks whether this explains the institutions of precolonial Africa. Before the era of the slave trades, he finds, land abundance does predict African slavery. The slave trades then changed the pattern: political centralisation and slavery came to determine each other, and polygyny, often described as an ancient African tradition, spread during the slave-trade era. Land abundance never explains political decentralisation. The lecture draws on his new paper, Domar in Africa: Land Abundance, the Slave Trades, and the Choice of Institutions, a first draft on which he welcomes comments.

Whatley taught at Michigan from 1981 to 2016, in economics and in Afroamerican and African Studies. He is a former president of the National Economic Association and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History. His research covers the economic history of Africa and of African Americans in the United States, and his book Slavery, Freedom, and Development: How Africa Became the Mirror Image of Europe was published by Cambridge University Press. He discussed the book on the Our Long Walk podcast in May.

See all LEAP Lectures since 2016, each with its film.

The lecture closes the day of the LEAP workshop on culture and economic policy.

Noah completed his PhD in economics at Emory University this year. He studies historical labour markets and the disparities between groups within them. Etienne comes to Stellenbosch from a postdoctoral position at the University of Namur. He works on culture, persistence and development, and presented in the LEAP seminar series in March.

The fellowships are funded by the Millennium Trust and Stellenbosch University.

Read more about them on the team page.

Abe de Jong delivered the keynote. Sessions covered slavery and emancipation in Jamaica, the Dutch Atlantic, the United States and the Cape, and a roundtable took up the history of slave revolt. The conference closed with two talks on Welgevallen, the university’s experimental farm, and on Stellenbosch’s own institutional history.

Project 1834 takes its name from the year in which slavery was abolished at the Cape. It has three pillars: research, redress through the histories of the university’s farms, and public history. Kate took up a three-year LEAP research position in January to lead it.

Read more about the project on the research page.

Drawing on her archival research, she traced the lives of enslaved people who secured freedom for themselves and their families. The address showed how careful historical work can recover individual stories and connect the archive to present-day debates about social justice.

The lecture closed LEAP’s conference on AI and economic history, held in Stellenbosch that week, at which Caterina Chiopris and Emily Aiken gave the keynotes. Meredith has since joined the University of Oxford.

Watch the lecture, or see all LEAP Lectures.

The talk, Make African Economic History Great Again, was well received.

Read about the postdoctoral fellows who joined LEAP in 2026.

Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow. His job-market paper on Bible translations in Africa combines a new dataset on missions, language and infrastructure with careful identification to show how writing down vernacular languages shaped colonial investment and long-run education and health.

Tim has just submitted his PhD. It builds new twentieth-century data for South African mining and manufacturing, and uses growth accounting, structural modelling and quasi-experimental evidence to measure how apartheid’s labour and transport institutions misallocated talent and cost the economy in productivity.