Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie

Serfdom was an institutional system giving lords the legal right to restrict the choices of peasants living on their land. My current project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, analyses how serfdom interacted with market, state, community, town, family, gender, religion, and culture from c. 850 to 1861, shaping economy and society in Europe for over 1,000 years.

My 2025 book, Controlling Contagion, investigates seven centuries of epidemics, from the Black Death to Covid-19, to ask how societies manage the externalities of contagion. I show that markets, states, communities, religions, guilds and families each had strengths and weaknesses. Good outcomes depended on fostering a diversity of institutions that played to their own strengths and checked each other’s flaws.

My 2019 book, The European Guilds, analyses thousands of craft guilds across Europe from 1000 to 1880. I weigh their benefits for quality control and skill transmission against their costs in market manipulation, exclusion, and blocked innovation. Guilds persisted, I find, not because they corrected market failures but because they served two powerful constituencies: their members and political elites.