Sheilagh Ogilvie

Economic historian Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie looks at seven centuries of pandemics and explains how human institutions such as markets, states, communities, religions, guilds and families have helped to both control them and exacerbate them.

Ogilvie says that infectious diseases, from the Black Death to Covid-19, have killed more people than famine or war throughout history. Our efforts in countering them are much more successful today, but we are using many of the same processes as our ancestors. Ogilvie explains how human societies co-ordinated and innovated in response to infections long before the science of medicine was established. And she shows how human institutions react to pandemics and how they have weaknesses that can make them worse.

Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and director of the Oxford Centre for Economic and Social History. Her books include The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis and A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany.