Speaker

Sheilagh Ogilvie

Sheilagh Ogilvie

Economic historian and Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford, Fellow of All Souls College — the first woman to hold the Chichele chair — after 31 years teaching in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge; a leading authority on European guilds, serfdom, and the economics of epidemic disease.

Ogilvie grew up in Calgary, Western Canada, and has lived in Britain for over four decades. Her research centres on the institutions of early modern Europe — guilds, serfdom, marriage systems, and the state — and increasingly on epidemic disease as a lens on institutional performance. Her books include A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (2003), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800 (2011), The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (2019), and most recently Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to COVID (2025), the book discussed in her Conversations with Tyler appearance. Her current project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is a history of European serfdom from 1000 to 1861.

Core positions

  • Persistence is not proof of benefit. Guilds, the European marriage pattern, and religious opposition to inoculation all outlasted the point at which they stopped serving the societies that kept them — because each bundled a valued good (training, welfare substitution, community) with a costly restriction (exclusion, stagnant fertility patterns, anti-scientific belief).
  • Guilds functioned largely as cartels. Beyond some genuine vocational training in the Dutch and English cases, she reads craft and merchant guilds as entry-restricting bodies that excluded on grounds of sex, religion, poverty, migration status, and even skin colour, chiefly to protect members’ prices.
  • Local government outperformed central government at epidemic control. Contra state-capacity theory’s emphasis on centralisation, she finds local authorities better informed and better placed to manage contagion, with central government’s chief value confined to coordinating across localities.
  • The Black Death’s ‘silver lining’ is overstated and regionally uneven. Western Europe’s eventual wage gains took decades to appear and coexisted with the opposite outcome in Eastern Europe, where the same labour shortage produced the ‘second serfdom’ rather than a freer labour market.

In the wiki