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.
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Recorded February 27th, 2025
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Thanks to a listener who sponsored this transcript “in memory of Charlotte Shapiro, my beloved grandmother who would have appreciated Mercatus and its mission.”
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m chatting with Sheilagh Ogilvie, who is a historian and an economic historian. She is currently at All Souls College of Oxford, formerly of Cambridge University. Originally hails from, I believe, Western Canada. She has a new book out, which is excellent. The title is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to COVID. Sheilagh, welcome.
SHEILAGH OGILVIE: It’s a pleasure to be here.
COWEN: The history of epidemics — when there were earlier pandemics, how large would a GDP decline typically be? How bad were they for economies?
OGILVIE: They were really bad for economies. First, they were bad because people were really frightened because there was nothing they felt that they could do about it personally. So, they withdrew from the market voluntarily, as it were. Then on top of that, there were all sorts of measures to try to limit the spread of contagion, and that also, of course, had an impact on the economy. So, it was a double whammy as far as people in the past were concerned.
COWEN: Do you have a sense of the relative importance of those two factors?
OGILVIE: I have a table in the book where I try to put together probably 15 or 16 quantitative examples that we have from shortly after the Black Death straight through to the present day, and it varied hugely. On the whole, it seems as if voluntary market withdrawal was pretty high in the medieval and early modern period. But people were poorer then, and so the implications of withdrawing from the market were really big for them because a lot of them didn’t have any cushion of savings.
Until the late medieval period, there was no tendency for the local community or the state to provide support for people who observed lockdown. I think there were really big differences compared to nowadays, but on the whole, it looks like voluntary market withdrawal was really higher in past epidemics than it was, for instance, during influenza in the early 20th century or COVID in the early 21st.
COWEN: The range of GDP declines — what would those numbers be?
OGILVIE: I think that’s a question that should be answered, but we can’t answer it right now. All we can observe is the degree to which people stopped buying beer in a particular tavern in a Middle Eastern city in the 15th century. We can’t generalize that to the whole of the economy. In a sense, we’re just trying to have good macroeconomic estimates of what GDP was for a lot of these economies.
Let’s say 50 percent to 60 percent, sometimes 90 percent withdrawal from the market of individuals. For instance, the merchant use of the postal system in 17th century Italian cities during plagues went down 90 percent compared to what it normally was.
COWEN: Why did the 1969 pandemic not have bigger economic effects?
OGILVIE: The ’69 flu pandemic?
COWEN: Right. It just wasn’t that bad a flu, or people ignored it, or what happened?
OGILVIE: That’s a good question. We thought we didn’t even need to study these things until recently. Looking at how people responded to different pandemics is . . . I remember I was a kid at the time that pandemic was going on, but we didn’t really pay attention to it in 1969.
COWEN: Same here. I remember 1969, but I don’t remember there was a pandemic.
OGILVIE: [laughs] I remember. Was it called the Spanish Flu or the Hong Kong flu?
COWEN: Hong Kong flu, I believe.
OGILVIE: It’s always blamed on foreigners.
[laughter]
OGILVIE: That is something that goes right back to the Black Death.
COWEN: Now, one commonly hears the claim that the Black Death — of course, it was terrible for society, terrible for those who died, but that in some ways — medium term, longer term — it had positive effects. That wages went up, that spurred labor-saving innovation, helped Europe grow. Is there any truth to that? Or is that just a story that’s fabricated?
OGILVIE: My personal view is that it is mostly a happy story, a takeaway from something that we all intuitively know was terrible. I think the sheer scale of the human suffering or death — 30 percent to 60 percent of the European and Middle Eastern population died. Compared to modern pandemics, it’s the worst pandemic we have any information about. Just a lot of people died. Walking through villages and towns after the Black Death would’ve been way worse than Dresden after the Second World War or Altadena after the fires a month ago.
Even the survivors — in the longer term, maybe their wages went up, and in some cases their bargaining ability vis-à-vis employers went up, but for the time being, their employers were dead. Their villages were deserted. They were basically walking around having lost one- to two-thirds of their neighbors. It took a while for the beneficial redistributional effects to kick in. It wasn’t until the later 14th or even the early 15th century that the wage effects really started redistributing towards the workers and away from the owners of land and capital.
The other thing is that the effects were really different in different societies. The happy story is one that we tell ourselves about Western Europe, where there was a comparatively free bargain that went on between workers and employers. In Eastern Europe, the shortage of labor after the Black Death actually created an incentive for the major employers who were the feudal landlords to strengthen their controls, their restrictions over their serfs, over their unfree peasants.
You actually get something called the second serfdom coming into effect, where the incentives for landlords to coerce unfree labor become really strong when you have very little labor. So, Eastern Europe goes into serfdom. Western Europe frees itself from serfdom. Even the happy story — it’s regionally very various.
COWEN: Just from a theory point of view, I’ve never understood the happy story. I see that the supply of labor goes down, but one would think the demand for labor and the products of labor would go down more or less proportionally. Why is there any reason to expect real wages to go up in that scenario?
OGILVIE: The wage evidence actually does suggest that gradually, as the economy recovered after the Black Death in Western Europe, wages went up. Employers actually immediately start complaining to the government, “Oh, you have to suppress wages. There aren’t enough servants. There aren’t enough laborers.” Even in Western Europe, the rulers try to do that. There was a perception, at any rate, that workers felt that they were able to demand higher wages, and in particular, females were demanding higher wages.
This was seen as really outrageous because women were supposed to be obedient, disciplined workers, and here they were saying, “I’m going to leave the village unless you increase my wages.” Although your reasoning is right, I think the balance of the effect really was to increase wage pressure. But how the society responded to it depended a lot on whether the employers could get the state on their side to help suppress the wage demands.
COWEN: Let’s say we send you back in time, let’s say to southwestern Germany. It’s an area you know a lot about, during the Black Death, and you can give people advice, what they should do to cope. What do you tell them?
OGILVIE: That’s a very good question. Maybe the first thing I would say is, don’t believe what your priest says, [laughs] because one of the things I do in the book is I try to assess the effect of different social institutions. One of them is religion.
Although religion did provide consolation and a certain amount of charitable support, one of the very, very salient things it did during the Black Death was that most religious figures admonished people that, in order to induce God to take away the plague, it was essential for them to get together in processions and church services, not observe social distancing, but engage in super spreader events.
Perhaps I was joking slightly to say don’t listen to your parish priest, but in the short term, I would definitely have said that. The question about what to do in the longer term is a good one because just allowing people to decide for themselves about whether to withdraw from the market or whether to keep away from their neighbors is one partial solution. We know that people withdraw from the market spontaneously, even nowadays and in most historical societies, but they probably don’t withdraw as much as they would if they were taking into account the effect of their actions on other people.
Although I would be advising the villagers to keep your market transactions going — it’s the thing that’s going to generate enough resources for you to pay for recovery and invest in health inputs and so on — I would be saying, “You might want to get together within your community to think about observing some sanitation, some social distancing in a coordinated way, not just as individuals.”
COWEN: Are there any fictional depictions of pandemics that you find persuasive? Manzoni, Camus, Pamuk? Anything? Even Boccaccio. Who do you think, “Oh, this captures it”?
OGILVIE: [laughs] Actually, I do think Boccaccio captures it. When I was writing the book, I kept on finding that there were passages in Boccaccio which exactly described what the historical sources were showing. He would describe how people in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death — the family, to some extent, broke down. People were abandoning their family members. They weren’t helping their neighbors. It was casting a dark light on the ability of family and community to cope by itself during such a huge crisis.
Probably Boccaccio would be my favorite, maybe because he himself had experienced it. The later fictional accounts — they’re great literature, but I somehow felt that they convinced me less than a guy who actually went through it.
[laughter]
COWEN: Who or what invented variolation?
OGILVIE: We don’t know. It was a spontaneous invention as far as we know in all sorts of societies across the world, lost in the mists of time. The first documents we have suggest that it was widely practiced in China in the 1560s. They got integrated into Chinese religion, but also, they had commercial variolators. There was a dynasty of commercial variolators operating in China in the 16th century.
We, in Europe, learned about it — not we, but my ancestors, I guess, mostly came from Europe as far as I know — learned about it not until the 18th century. It had been being practiced in China, in northern Africa, in the Middle East, possibly in India since the 16th or 17th century.
It was introduced into England in the first couple of decades of the 18th century simultaneously by an English East India company surgeon writing a letter back to the Royal Society in London and by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was the ambassador’s wife in Istanbul — Constantinople as it then was — who learned that there was this amazing practice, which the women of Constantinople practiced in order to prevent both themselves and their children from getting smallpox.
She actually got an English doctor in Istanbul to do it to her two-year-old son. Then when she went back to England, she got it done. It was probably the first variolation in England. She got it done by the same doctor. She dragged him out of retirement and said, “Do my daughter.” He did it. Because she was a member of the aristocracy, she made it the cool thing to do. She was an early 18th-century influencer, and it became the fashionable thing for aristocratic ladies and then upwardly mobile people to do.
It happened that it was a really good way of spreading it because we even know nowadays that mothers, women are often the decision-makers as far as vaccination and health decisions in the family are concerned. The fact that she was such a great influencer, and she modeled this behavior as being very cool and what rich upper-class ladies did, meant that it spread very quickly in England, but sadly, very much not on the continent of Europe.
COWEN: How well did it work back then? Was it a no-brainer that you should do it? Or it was highly risky? What do we know?
OGILVIE: It was a little bit risky. If you carried out a cost-benefit analysis, you would do it. Variolation, for those of our listeners who don’t know about it, was like vaccination before vaccination. It wasn’t that you got injected with cowpox, which is not a disease that kills you. You got injected with a weakened version of smallpox itself. Because it was weakened, it normally didn’t kill you. It gave you a mild attack of the disease, but 1.6 percent of people who got variolated died of it.
On the other hand, the risk of actually catching smallpox and dying of it was something between 10 percent and 20 percent. You get these doctors in both China and England saying, “You should just think about it as a merchant would do. Cost and benefits. The risk is really high that you will get natural smallpox, and the risk that you will die of variolation is only 1.6 percent, and therefore you should do it.” They’re using the calculus of capitalism to decide whether to get variolated or whether to get it done to their children, and lots of people did.
COWEN: Should we have done that in 2020, as Robin Hanson suggested? If it passes the cost-benefit test?
OGILVIE: [laughs] I don’t know if variolation would work for COVID is the problem. It’s a virus, not a bacterium. I’m not sure. It’s not a herd immunity argument; it’s an actual medical immunization argument. Clearly, normal people understood it very well in the 18th century.
If you were a teenager in an English village in the 18th century and you were deciding, “I’m going to move to London and get a job,” you and your friendship group from the village would all go into the nearest town and pay a commercial variolator. You’d all get smallpox together. You’d go back to your village. You’d suffer through this mild case of smallpox, and then you would be immunized for life, assuming that you hadn’t died. You would go off to London and seek your fortune. It was very much a normal teenage thing to do.
There was this incredible franchising set up in England. It was like a McDonald’s, but to get variolated. There were these entrepreneurs who advertised themselves as having lower-risk ways of getting immunized and cheaper ways of getting immunized. There was this famous family of the Suttons that started a franchise in 18th-century England in the 1750s. Then they spread into the continent of Europe and actually into North America.
COWEN: You would have done it back then?
OGILVIE: Oh, definitely.
COWEN: With enthusiasm.
OGILVIE: I’m a counter. I look at 1.6 percent and compare it to 10 percent or 20 percent. I know which way I’d go. [laughs]
COWEN: The earlier history of pandemics — if you had to say, in general, did local autonomy or centralized control do better? What is your view?
OGILVIE: Local autonomy, definitely. One of the big theories that economists have developed in recent years about how to get nearly every good outcome in economics is to have lots of state capacity. One component of the theory of state capacity is that you want state centralization. Well, I’m not really totally convinced about that for any outcome, but certainly the historical evidence suggests that local government was a lot more effective than central government at dealing with contagion control.
COWEN: What were they better at? How did that play out?
OGILVIE: They were better in lots of ways. They were also not so good in a couple of ways. They were better in knowing what the local preference was of the cost-benefit analysis between economic effects and epidemiological effects. They were good at liaising with informal community-level neighborly effects, so monitoring of neighbors by one another, altruism among neighbors, and so on.
They were really highly informed about who was keeping the well clean, who was getting variolated or vaccinated — the sharp-eyed neighbor, the curtain-twitching effect. They were highly informed. It probably wasn’t that fun if you were not keeping your latrine clean and you weren’t getting vaccinated, but your neighbors were watching you.
They were pretty good at — at least in some parts of Europe — running a local-level welfare system where they could observe which villagers were going through difficulties and provide them with some welfare support that would enable them to observe lockdown or get variolated, or would provide them with some food if they needed to quarantine. That often works well on the local level because the deserving poor are very easily identified locally.
So, I’m talking up local government. The problem is that pandemics, epidemics often spill out beyond the village walls. When that was the case, you actually sometimes needed higher levels of government to bang a few local heads together because the problem with villages and small towns is that they only care about what’s going on inside the community. Sometimes we know there are cross-border externalities. None of us are safe until we’re all safe.
Looking at the spillover effects beyond the local community, I think having higher levels of government to do a bit of local head banging was a useful thing. But on the whole, it was local governments that did most of the heavy lifting, and the central government, at best, was just permitting the local government to do its thing rather than actually taking initiatives.
COWEN: Now, you were living in England during the COVID pandemic, right?
OGILVIE: I was.
COWEN: Given all the history you know, what struck you as standing out or surprising or unusual? How do you see the British response differently from how less-informed people might?
OGILVIE: I was not that happy with the British response while I was living here. There were aspects of it that I continued to be unhappy with until fairly recently.
There were things I was very proud of in the sense that the Oxford COVID vaccine got developed really quickly and rolled out really quickly, and I had it, and that was wonderful. Of course, I had just moved to Oxford at the beginning of COVID. I taught for 30 years in Cambridge before I moved to All Souls College. I was starting a new job at the exact time that COVID was starting. I was very pleased that science was kicking in. I think that was something that Britain did fairly well. Some other countries had more delay in approving the early vaccines.
On the other hand, one thing I didn’t like was that there were some government initiatives that actually paid people to go out and go to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on. Our then chancellor of the exchequer had a program called Help Out to Eat Out, and he was actually subsidizing people to go out to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on to help business.
A very nice piece of econometric analysis was carried out by an economist at Warwick, which showed that immediately after the Eat Out to Help Out initiative was put into place, there were massive increases in COVID infections and deaths in the affected places. I think that was shocking.
The other thing that I didn’t like about living here was that it was actually not possible to get a COVID vaccination on the market until last year. You had to wait to come up in the queue of the government deciding whether your age group was allowed to be vaccinated. Whereas, not just in Canada and the United States, but in Germany, in France, all over Europe . . .
I had a former postdoc who was saying, “Yes, I’m going on holiday next week. I’ve made an appointment with my GP” — this was in Essen in Germany — “to get my COVID vaccination.” He was just free to do it, whereas the rest of us were waiting for our government permission to get our vaccination. I thought it was a reversal of Britain’s precocious status as the world’s center of variolation in the 18th century. Why was it being like this? It had a really highly market-provided variolation system in the 18th century. Why was it not mobilizing market provision of vaccination in the 21st?
You probably have things you remember from living in the US during the COVID pandemic that perhaps weren’t quite the way you might have liked them to be.
COWEN: I drove to North Carolina to get my vaccine a month early, and that worked out great. It was totally legal, to be clear. Federalism has some advantages, referring back to local autonomy.
OGILVIE: You know what you were like? You were like diplomats from the Netherlands and Spain and France in the 18th century, where at home it was illegal to get variolated. They would make sure that they got a posting to London, and they would take all their kids with them so they could all get variolated in London. They were jurisdiction shopping as well.
COWEN: Given your long knowledge of the history — opposition to variolation, opposition to vaccination — when you see so much opposition today, especially in my country, where does that come from? What insight do you have as to the persistence of these crazy views?
OGILVIE: [sighs] Historically, it was related . . . Nowadays, its sources are partly historical, and you can see their roots in history because one of the sources of opposition to both variolation and vaccination was religion. Not mainstream religion, but extreme, dissenting religion, if you like, the religious left and extreme authoritarian religion, if you like. The super orthodox Catholics, for instance, in France were very anti-variolation, as were the super Protestant dissenter types in, for instance, Germany and various parts of Scandinavia. So, it was the religious extremes, which were —
COWEN: How do you model that? Why are those the people who oppose it? Is it rebelliousness? Or they don’t trust authority?
OGILVIE: I don’t think it can be not trusting authority because they certainly believe in their own authority. The religious right, the Jansenist Catholics in France, certainly were not [laughs] anti-authoritarian.
I was talking to a colleague who was writing a book about the economics of religion while I was writing my book, and it was during COVID. We were talking about how religion is a platform, if you like. It’s like Amazon in the sense that you get a bunch of different services from it.
One reason why people sign up to anti-variolation or anti-vax sentiment is that they want other things which their particular religious platform is offering. It might be offering spiritual consolation, it might be offering charitable relief, it might be offering social networking. In order to get the linked goods within that religious platform, you have to sign up to the epistemological craziness of the anti-scientific views. That was one reason historically, and I think that’s still in operation.
Historically, there was another reason, which was the medical guilds — the equivalent of the American Medical Association, only much, much worse, back in early modern Europedid not like the idea of this new thing, this new technology that they had not approved and that was also going to challenge their business model and take away their fees from treating smallpox patients. In France and in Spain, it was the medical guilds, together with the Catholic Church, that lobbied the state to make variolation illegal. It was this unholy alliance between the medical associations and religion.
Fortunately, modern medical associations are not as bad as medical guilds. There may be some ways in which they’re similar, but in that respect, they’re not. There are renegade medics who go on the internet and say, “I’m a trained medic, and I can tell you vaccination is bad.” But in general, medical associations aren’t like that anymore.
COWEN: You mentioned the guilds. One of the things you’re best known for is your two books on the guilds [The European Guilds, Institutions and European Trade] and your articles. What’s the best argument you can make on behalf of Medieval and Renaissance guilds? Is there anything you can say for them?
OGILVIE: [laughs] I might be becoming soft-hearted in my old age, but I think there are examples of guild systems which operated effective professional training. I would say the Dutch and English guilds had a fairly good vocational training system. It was good because it did provide a training framework for young people to learn crafts and services. In England and the Netherlands, it was even possible for females, for girls, to sometimes get vocational training and not be excluded from the guild apprenticeship system.
The other amazing thing about the English guild system was that, once you had been apprenticed to any occupation in London, you could practice any other. You just had to get membership of one guild, and then you could do any guilded occupation in London. This was unique. This was not the way guilds normally were.
I’ve finished saying my good things about the guilds. The bad things were that no other apprenticeship system in Europe was flexible like that. In fact, in most European societies, guilds fundamentally in principle, didn’t let women, girls get any formal vocational training. They excluded Jews. They excluded poor boys who could not pay the several years of wages necessary to pay the training fees. They excluded migrants.
They excluded people with the wrong color of skin. In 18th-century Spain, a cobbler’s guild in one Spanish city excluded all boys from apprenticeship whose skin was darker than the color of quince jelly. There was a literal color bar to getting into a guild, even getting any training. It was completely not merit-based.
I think, in general, the problem with guilds is that they seek the benefits of their existing members, and restricting entry always enables you to raise prices. It was quite difficult to prevent a guild from behaving like a little mini cartel.
I would say guilds did operate training systems for those they let in, but they didn’t let everyone in. They did some quality control over goods and services, but they often imposed quality restrictions that meant that it was not possible to sell cheap and nasty products. They focused on the nastiness, and they didn’t focus on the fact that sometimes less well-off people would like something nasty as long as it’s a bit cheaper.
COWEN: Do you think the guilds improved the history of Western art or damaged it? If you look at Florence, there are some notable commissions. Arguably, Dutch municipal buildings may have benefited from guild investment. Were there any offshoot public goods, or there was more damage done?
OGILVIE: I think definitively the damage greatly outweighed the benefits, but it’s a bit like the German Hanseatic League. If you go to those amazing Hanseatic cities in northern Germany and Scandinavia — beautiful architecture, amazing — just glorious use of the rents. You wouldn’t want there to have been serfdom, but the beautiful palaces built by incredibly rich Eastern European aristocrats are an enduring legacy.
You could say it’s something that the state does. Not everything the state does is good, but early modern princes built the Palace of Versailles, and we’re happy that those monuments still exist, but I’m not sure that we would want to get back to that social framework.
COWEN: There’s something called the European marriage pattern. You’ve written on this extensively. To what extent did it contribute to later European economic growth?
OGILVIE: This is a really big debate. My view of it is that the European marriage pattern is observable in a wide range of European countries in central and western and northwestern Europe. Just for our listeners, the European marriage pattern has three key characteristics: relatively late marriage for women, so in their mid to late 20s; a significant proportion of especially women but, of course, also men, never marrying in their entire lives, so lifelong celibacy 10 percent to 15 percent; and primarily nuclear family households.
Together, it has been argued that these things were good for subsequent economic growth. That’s mainly based on the fact that England and the Netherlands had the European marriage pattern, and they had amazing economic growth. The Dutch Golden Age was between 1560 and 1670, and then England starts taking off after about 1650 and, of course, becomes the first country to industrialize. People who initially studied the European marriage pattern said, “Oh, this is something that existed in England and the Netherlands. It must have caused economic growth.”
The problem is that the European marriage pattern also existed in extremely poor, stagnant economies in eastern and central Europe, Nordic Europe, Scandinavian countries, places that had serfdom, like Bohemia, the present-day Czech Republic, places in Scandinavia that didn’t industrialize until the late 19th century. Extreme versions of the European marriage pattern were strongly associated with economic stagnation.
COWEN: But all those places do industrialize, even Eastern Europe. After Communism, many decades of terrible policy, they catch up pretty well. Isn’t there something enduring about that culture?
Say, if we look at Sahel in Africa, where there’s a lot of polygamy. A woman might be married at age 14, have a lot of kids that won’t be well-educated, doesn’t pass down a lot of human capital to her kids. Doesn’t that continuing regularity show us there really is something to the European marriage pattern?
OGILVIE: I think the question is, those patterns of low human capital investment — do they come from the family system as an autonomous thing? Or do people have very early marriage and universal marriage and huge families partly to substitute for the absence of other institutions to get things done? Everyone needs to marry if there’s no way of saving for your old age, or there’s no pension system, or there’s no welfare system. You may need to have a huge kinship group in order to protect you if the state can’t protect property rights and personal security.
COWEN: Then it’s a trap you’re caught in. It might be initially effect, but then it becomes cause of future stagnation. You can sit up and say, “Gee, I wish we had had all European marriage pattern for the last 400 years.”
OGILVIE: Well, I think, if I had a wish list, I’d be saying, “Gee, I wish we’d had markets and states.” I don’t care what kind of family system you have. I think the family — let’s say it’s not necessarily just a response to other institutions, but it’s the whole institutional framework. Those involve vigorous markets and effective and non-abusive, if you like, states and many other social institutions. Once you have these effective other institutions, often you do end up having a later marriage and a nuclear family, because the family doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting in society.
Until we know what it is that keeps these bad equilibria in place, I don’t think we should conclude that it’s just the family, somehow the family by itself. There’s some culture that causes people to stay in that situation. It’s a bit of a sad policy if, in order to change the outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, we have to completely change people’s culture. Let’s see what we can do with better institutions, and if there’s a cultural component left over in the end, then we can start thinking about it.
COWEN: Both Greg Clark and Emi Nakamura with co-authors, have good papers arguing sustained economic growth dates from England in the 1620s. (A) do you agree? (B) to the extent you agree, what happens? What is special behind that era causing that?
OGILVIE: I think the question of exactly when it starts in the 17th century is debated. The per capita GDP figures might be the mid-17th century. Some argue that it might be after 1690. Some, as you say, argue that it’s a bit earlier in the 17th century. I would be happy to go with the 17th century for now.
Why? You’re probably going to get tired of me saying this. I think there was a much livelier institution of the market emerging after about 1600. State capacity was increasing but not becoming authoritarian. Guilds were weakening. The kind of state capacity you had in England was local-level state capacity, local government, parish-level rather than centralized.
The one thing that England had was a great legal system, but it had hardly any bureaucrats. There was a tiny customs service and army and navy, but they didn’t have paid local-level bureaucrats the way they did in France or in Germany.
So, there were all sorts of things which came together in England in the 17th century, which had actually already begun. They’d come together in the Low Countries in the Netherlands in the 16th century. It was a cluster of different institutional innovations, if you like, that first the Netherlands and then England enjoyed in the 16th and 17th centuries, which let the inherent entrepreneurial nature — I think, of all cultures, not just of English culture — loose in the course of the 17th century.
COWEN: When it comes to the Industrial Revolution proper, which comes, of course, to Britain but not so much to what we now call the Netherlands Dutch Republic, is coal the difference there? Or why did the Dutch Republic not continue on a good track? They stayed okay, but they didn’t make the same progress.
OGILVIE: No, they got stuck in a rich equilibrium if you like. Per capita GDP in England doesn’t surpass that in the Dutch Republic until after 1800, after there’s been 40 years of Industrial Revolution. The Dutch Republic is stagnating at a really high level. You probably wouldn’t have complained had you been a Dutch burger in 1800.
But you’re right, it was an 18th-century stagnation. In fact, after about 1670, the Dutch Republic stagnates at a high level. It’s immensely debated by Dutch historians and by others. I think that some argue that Dutch stagnation was caused by outside influences, like wars with France. I’m not an expert on the Dutch Republic, but I think that you can observe its internal domestic institutions getting ossified, petrifying in the course of the 18th century.
After having greatly liberalized its guilds in the 16th century, they actually kick back in and become more restrictive in the 18th century. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC gets these incredible monopolies. It starts dominating the business system and the financial system to an extent that I think probably was not beneficial. It became possible for entrenched groups of craft and commercial producers to exclude innovations.
It was a reversal between the south and north of the Netherlands because the southern Netherlands had fallen behind the north in the Dutch Golden Age, but it was actually the southern Netherlands — what we now call Belgium — that was in the second wave of industrialization after England.
The underlying strength of the Low Countries in general kicked in in the late 18th century when Belgium and northern France started to industrialize. I think there were some really great fundamental strengths of the Low Countries, but I don’t know exactly why the Dutch Republic entrenched oligarchy started to block further growth in the 18th century.
COWEN: What do you think of the Greg Clark hypothesis, that England basically has never had much real social mobility, and it just hasn’t improved over the centuries? It depends who your parents were, it might be genetic. You just cycle through the same families, the same surnames. Agree or disagree?
OGILVIE: On the whole, mostly disagree. I think many societies are a bit like that. You see certain countries who have presidential dynasties of various sorts. You see a lot, in fact, especially now that things like education matter so much. Insofar as education is influenced by your parents, you can end up getting an oligarchy of very educated people.
It’s a big problem in any society. I think we need cross-country comparisons of social mobility because, even if you observe England having quite a lot of immobility over the long period, the question is, what’s the counterfactual? Shouldn’t you be looking at Germany? Shouldn’t you be looking at France? Shouldn’t you be looking at other comparable countries?
My main research has been on German-speaking central Europe and points east. I think when you compare social mobility in those countries with that in England, England looks like an incredibly mobile society. [laughs] So, I’m not quite so gloomy about England when I look at what the alternatives were on the continent of Europe, which were even more immobile, and where legal social status was actually legally entrenched.
There’s that famous scene in The Sorrows of Young Werther, where Werther, who’s an educated man but not a member of the gentry, has to leave the parlor before the dancing begins. He has to leave his lady that he would like to marry. He isn’t allowed to stay there because it’s the wrong legal social class. That’s the late 18th century. I don’t think that that would be happening in England at the time.
COWEN: You’ve now lived in England for well over 30 years. What’s been your biggest surprise about the place, if anything has stuck?
OGILVIE: It keeps on surprising me. I’ve actually lived here for more than 46 years. I moved here as an undergraduate. I came here when I was 16, and I feel as if I’m still doing anthropological fieldwork on the behavioral patterns of these strange local tribes. There are these systematic things — they’re charming, but they’re very strange.
For instance, just to give one example, English people are very reserved. I get on with that because Canadians are fairly reserved as well. It’s okay to talk to people in your neighborhood if they have a dog with them. That’s a conversation mediator. Or if you are gardening in your front garden, but if you’re in your back garden, you’re not supposed to talk to people. It’s taken me a few decades to observe this as an empirical regularity.
Nobody ever tells you that this is how you’re supposed to behave, but if you keep your field notebooks going as an anthropologist, you begin to notice the tribal patterns of the English. I must like them, since here I still am after more than four decades.
It’s an interesting experience of how you grow up. I grew up in Calgary in Western Canada and probably, fundamentally, I’m still a girl from Calgary. I’m enjoying my anthropological research. I think the thing I really like about Britain is, they’re very open to . . . It’s quite good to be a foreigner here because if you behave in an eccentric way, they think it’s just because you’re foreign. They don’t blame you for it. I think that’s quite a charming characteristic.
COWEN: Do you think English society tolerates its own eccentrics well?
OGILVIE: I actually do think it does. I think, especially after 30 years in Cambridge, and now 5 years in Oxford, some of my colleagues are even more eccentric than I am, and that’s fine. Not only do their colleagues like it, but the students really like it. The students totally get on with having supervisions in Cambridge, tutorials in Oxford, with people who are slightly odd. I think that’s an important part of one’s education — both having colleagues who are eccentric and also teaching the next generation that it’s okay to be weird, and I think England’s still like that.
COWEN: Let’s say an 18-year-old, highly intelligent young woman comes to you. She’s moving to England; she might want to be a professor. What advice do you give to her? From America, let’s say.
OGILVIE: From America. My academic advice would be the advice that . . . My younger sister came to study in England long after I did. After her first year at the Institute of Archaeology in London, she said, “Sheilagh, why didn’t you tell me that the way the British university system works is that you aren’t allowed to make up your own essay questions? You have to focus on the essay question they have set.” I thought, “Yes, that’s the fundamental piece of wisdom I would pass on from an educational point of view,” which is, answer the essay questions set.
But in a more general framework, I would say, and this is actually not just England-specific, but changing cultures. When I was 20, I went to live in Germany. I lived there, actually, for quite a long time while I was doing research for my doctorate.
When you initially go to a foreign place, whether it’s Germany — or later, I lived in the Czech Republic for a year — you won’t figure out right away what people in this culture do to feel comfortable and have fun. But you have to have the faith that they do have things that they do, and you need to learn what those things are that they do in this culture to be comfortable with one another and to have a great time.
The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be fitting into a new culture. I think that would be my general life advice to anyone who is moving to a new country. Find out what people do for fun, and then start doing it.
COWEN: When you were living in Württemberg, what was the biggest puzzle for you?
OGILVIE: I think the biggest puzzle was the strength of the local community. I moved there in the fall of 1979.
COWEN: Where were you living exactly?
OGILVIE: I was living in Stuttgart, and I realized that everyone was watching one another all the time. There were lots of things that you had to do. I was living in Swabia, which is well-known as being very traditional and very communitarian. You have to clean the sidewalk. It is your responsibility.
Within the building, if you’re in a block of flats, you have a particular week during which you do the Kehrwoche. You have to clean the sidewalk. The other people in the street will watch to see if that bit of sidewalk has been cleaned, whether it’s garbage in the summer or snow in the winter. If it hasn’t, they’ll complain to your building. Within the building, there’s a collective monitoring system. “Whose turn is it to do the sidewalk this week?” That was a really interesting thing to learn.
I think, in general, people were very communitarian. One time in a train, I hadn’t eaten. I was doing computer research at the Max Planck Institute. Hadn’t had anything to eat for 24 hours. On the train back to Stuttgart, I was eating an entire 100-gram chocolate bar. The old lady sitting across from me in the compartment — she couldn’t contain herself after a bit. She said, ‘‘You know that’s very unhealthy. You shouldn’t be eating so much chocolate.” I thought, “That would never happen in England. Would never happen in Canada.” They would assume that I had a good reason to be eating 100 grams of chocolate, which indeed I did.
In Germany, I think people at that time — I don’t know if it’s true anymore — I think they felt that it was their responsibility to express their moral views on what you had done. I think it was a good thing because I can really understand medieval and early modern village life in a way that I probably wouldn’t have growing up in Western Canada.
COWEN: It would surprise me when I lived in southern Germany, that if my shoelace were untied, someone would tell me immediately.
OGILVIE: So, you had that exact experience.
COWEN: This is in Freiburg, not Stuttgart, but they’re not so far apart.
OGILVIE: They’re not so far apart. Exactly. Freiburg is Catholic, Stuttgart’s Protestant, but I think the fundamental institution of the local community is very similar between the two.
COWEN: Now, how much do you think that coming from Western Canada has shaped how you understand these histories? Mostly it’s Europeans doing these European histories. How has it made you different?
OGILVIE: I think it’s been good in two ways. One is, I have no dog in the race. I’m Canadian. I don’t have emotional attachment to the history of any particular society in Europe. I hope it enables me to free myself of the desire either to criticize or to rehabilitate the past of a particular country that I’m looking at. I’m not saying Canada doesn’t have a history, but it doesn’t have a long history. It means that I’m endlessly curious about these places with deep, very, very long histories.
I wish I had a second life so that I could do Chinese economic history, which is the new frontier. More than half my graduate students are brilliant young Chinese students who want to do for pre-modern China, what a generation or more have done for medieval and early modern Europe. They’re busy comparing credit markets in eastern central Europe with credit markets in 19th-century or early 20th-century China.
The other completely uncharted frontier is, of course, Indian economic history. Often people will say, “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly go before the colonial period because there are no sources.” There are sources for pre-colonial India. They just haven’t been analyzed by economic historians.
It’s a long answer to your question. I think coming from a place with a short history has inspired me with a passion for understanding places with long histories.
COWEN: What’s the future of Canada?
OGILVIE: Probably not as the 51st state.
[laughter]
OGILVIE: I remember in the ’70s, Canadian literature writers and pointy heads in Canada were always lamenting that there wasn’t enough of a Canadian identity. I, as a teenager, felt I and everyone else who was Canadian knew perfectly well what it meant to be Canadian. We didn’t really need to lament not having an identity, so I don’t really feel that the Canadian identity is somehow at risk.
I think there are ways in which Canada could improve. I think the trade barriers between the provinces are a bad thing. I think there are various cartels that aren’t a great thing. But overall, I sense that Canada works pretty well. I wouldn’t defend to the death every single way that Canada currently works, but I don’t feel that it is about to dissolve in any way.
COWEN: Before my last question, let me just plug your new book again. It’s called Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. I believe it is the very best book on those topics.
OGILVIE: Thank you, Tyler.
COWEN: Final question: what will you do next?
OGILVIE: I was a very lucky person. A private foundation called the Leverhulme Trust — and I’m giving it a plug here — has given me a gigantic project grant, which pays for three years for a young person to be me in Oxford, to do my teaching and my admin and so on, while I am a free woman, and I research and write a book about European serfdom from the year 1000 to 1861. I’m looking at this hugely important social institution of serfdom, which I don’t even talk about in that book you very kindly plugged.
Watch the space. In three or four years’ time, there should be another gigantic book.
COWEN: Sheilagh Ogilvie, thank you very much.
OGILVIE: Thank you, Tyler. I really enjoyed it.