Controlling Contagion

Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid

Sheilagh Ogilvie

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English

Princeton University Press
18 February 2025

General & world history; Social & cultural history; Development economics; Political economy; Economic history

Series: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World

How human institutions

markets, states, communities, religions, guilds and families

have helped both to control and to exacerbate epidemics throughout history.

How do societies tackle epidemic disease? In Controlling Contagion, Sheilagh Ogilvie answers this question by exploring seven centuries of pandemics, from the Black Death to Covid-19. For most of history, infectious diseases have killed many more people than famine or war, and in 2019 they still caused one death in four. Today, we deal with epidemics more successfully than our ancestors managed plague, smallpox, cholera or influenza. But we use many of the same approaches. Long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated in response to biological shocks

sometimes well, sometimes badly.

Ogilvie uses historical epidemics to analyse how human societies deal with 'externalities'

situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others beyond those that I myself incur. Social institutions

markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families

help us manage the negative externalities of contagion and the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunisation. Ogilvie shows how each institution enables us to coordinate, innovate and inspire each other to limit contagion. But each institution also has weaknesses that can make things worse. Markets shut down voluntarily during every epidemic in history

but they also brought people together, spreading contagion. States mandated quarantines, sanitation, and immunisation

but they also waged war and censored information, exacerbating epidemics. Religions admonished us to avoid infecting our neighbours

but they also preached against science and medical innovations. What decided the outcome, Ogilvie argues, was a temperate state, an adaptable market, and a strong civil society where a diversity of institutions played to their own strengths and checked each other's flaws.

By: Sheilagh Ogilvie
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691255569
ISBN 10: 0691255563
Series: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World
Pages: 544
Publication Date: 18 February 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sheilagh Ogilvie is the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford, a fellow of All Souls College, and director of the Oxford Centre for Economic and Social History. She is the author of The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 10001800, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany, and State Corporatism and Proto-Industry: the Wrttemberg Black Forest, 15801797.

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

""Sheilagh Ogilvie’s book ranges from the 14th century- the era of the Black Death- to the 21st. . . .[Her] wide-ranging survey throws up some telling points. . . .[And] exposes some cherished fallacies.""---Virginia Berridge, BBC History Magazine