Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie

Economics, History

University Academic Fellow and Chichele Professor of Economic History since 2020

I explore the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. My research investigates how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present day. In recent years my publications have analysed serfdom, pandemics, guilds, communities, the family, gender, human capital, consumption, and state capacity. I have a particular interest in the long-term economic history of central and eastern Europe.

Links

Email: sheilagh.ogilvie@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

ORCID

Personal Website

Oxford Academia Profile

Research Areas

Economic History

Institutions

Serfdom

Guilds

Demography

Long-term Economic Growth

Selected Publications

Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025)

The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019)

'Institutions and Growth in Historical Perspective'

Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (eds.), Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2A (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014), 405-514 [with A. W. Carus]

Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

State Corporatism and Proto-Industry: the Württemberg Black Forest, 1580-1797

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Serfdom and Development

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.

Pandemic Lessons

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.

Guilds and Growth

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.