Overview

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.

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9780691255569

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Reviews

""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

""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 ""An impressive study.""---David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer ""This book is groundbreaking in the sociological aspects of epidemics. . . . Essential."" * Choice * ""An important book that opens analysis of epidemics across time and space within a new framework of institutional history""---Samuel Cohn, The Political Quarterly ""An ambitious study. . . .It is impossible to offer more than a glimpse of Ogilvie’s compass and erudition.""---Nicholas Brown, Australian Book Review ""This is the first scholarly work to connect [epidemics] to institutions, markets and how states perform over many centuries. . . .Professor Ogilvie unpacks what history and cross-country comparisons tell us about the ability of societies to respond to epidemics. . . .If there is one lesson from this most impressive book, it is that preparation for and effective responses to epidemics are of critical importance.""---R. Quentin Grafton, Economic Record ""This is the book I would have liked to read in March 2020. . . .Ogilvie’s essay is rich and brimming with ideas. . . .For its breadth, documentation, and depth, Sheilagh Ogilvie’s Controlling Contagion is a work you cannot open without learning something. The author deserves her readers’ full gratitude.""---Alberto Mingardi, The Curious Task

Author Information

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.

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