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Conversations with Tyler

Sheilagh Ogilvie on Epidemics, Guilds, and the Persistence of Bad Institutions

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sheilagh Ogilvie has spent decades examining the institutional structures that shaped European economic history, challenging conventional wisdom about everything from guilds to marriage patterns. In her conversation with Tyler, she reveals how studying pandemic responses from the Black Death to COVID-19 provides a unique lens for understanding deeper truths about institutional effectiveness and social constraints.

Tyler and Sheilagh discuss the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the "happy story" of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark's social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting "anthropological fieldwork" on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany, her upcoming research project on European serfdom, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded February 27th, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:09.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:13.5

Learn more at Mercadis.org.

0:15.7

For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,

0:20.4

visit Conversationswithtyler.com.

0:24.7

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

0:28.9

Today I'm chatting with Sheila Ogilvie, who is a historian and an economic historian.

0:34.7

She is currently at All Souls College of Oxford, formerly of Cambridge University,

0:40.2

originally hails from, I believe, Western Canada. She has a new book out, which is excellent,

0:46.3

and the title is Controlling Contagion, Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to COVID.

0:52.6

Sheila, welcome. It's pleasure to be here.

0:56.0

The history of epidemics.

0:57.6

When there were earlier pandemics, how large would a GDP decline typically be?

1:02.5

Like, how bad were they for economies?

1:04.6

They were really bad for economies.

1:06.3

So first, they were bad because people were really frightened because there was nothing. They felt

1:11.9

that they could do about it personally. So they withdrew from the market voluntarily, as it were,

1:17.8

and then on top of that, there were all sorts of measures to try to limit the spread of contagion,

1:24.9

and that also, of course, had an impact on the economy. So it was a sort

1:29.6

of double whammy as far as people in the past was concerned. Do you have a sense of the relative

1:34.5

importance of those two factors? So I have a table in the book where I try to put together probably

1:44.1

15 or 16 quantitative examples that we have

...

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