Papers so far confirmed:

Markéta Křížová: The Mosquito Coast in the 19th century – colonial competition and cultural syncretism
Small, but strategically located region of Central America, known since the 18th century as “Mosquito Coast” (Costa de Mosquitia), became in the 19th century point of intersection of imperial interests of the Great Britain, USA, the Central American republics, but also German states. At the same time, it became a locality of intense cultural mixing and mutual influencing of various racial and cultural groups. Until 1860 formally independent “Kingdom of Mosquitia” under the protectorate of the Great Britain, the region was then incorporated into Nicaragua as a “reserve” and in the year 1898 its autonomous status was cancelled. The Mosquito case is rather atypical in the context of American colonization. Therefore, it is a good starting point for the broader considerations of what were the common and specific features in the colonial history of the New World. The witnesses and participants of the developments on the Coast were members of the Moravian Church, a German Protestant agrupation. Precisely on the basis of sources from the archive of the Church, the case of Mosquito Shore will be presented as early manifestation of the British “indirect rule” colonial policy, as a case of “strategic” rather than economic colonization, and as a place where outer instigations in the forms of colonial endeavors intersected with inner cultural dynamics.

Erik Green: The end of slavery? – Labour relations and colonial institutions in Dutch and British Cape Colony
The content and role of colonial institutions and policies on long-term economic growth is a subject that has received considerable attention among economic-historians, historians and economists the last decade. Research on colonial history has to a large extent been shaped by the idea that each colonial power established its own specific institutions and policies. This paper critically assesses this assumption by looking at continuities and changes of rural labor relations on wine and wheat farms in Western Cape 1770 -1840. The organization of production was centered on the use of slaves and capital formation on wine and wheat farms were to a great extent depending on adequate supplies of slave laborers. A little more than decade after the British had taken control over the colony, new legislation was introduced that gradually led to the emancipation of slaves. On paper, it looks like a classic case of colonial rulers imposing different institutions which transformed the agricultural economy. This paper critically discusses this proposition by showing the degree of continuity of labor relations before and after the emancipation.

Johan Fourie (with Dieter von Fintel); Settler skills and colonial development
Not all settlers are the same. Although the arrival of the French Huguenots in 1688 is heralded as the event that buttressed European settlement in the Cape Colony of South Africa, was their impact limited to explaining the rapid growth of the population circa 1700? Using tax records, we show that, controlling for various factors, the French were more adept at viticulture than the non-French farmers at the Cape. Standard factors of production or institutional factors usually associated with faster growth do not explain the differences between the two groups. We posit that the skills of French matter in explaining the productivity differences. We test this hypothesis by dividing the French settlers into two groups: those originating from wine regions, and those from wheat regions. We find that descendants of settlers from wine regions in France were more productive wine makers in their adopted homeland than their non-wine compatriots, whose production function resembled more closely those of the Dutch and German farmers. This important insight – that home-country production function determines settler-society production functions even in later generations – sheds new light on our understanding of how newly-settled colonial societies develop.