Confabulating with Prof. Sheilagh Ogilvie

Chichele Professor of Economic History

All Souls

Prof. Ogilvie grew up in the western Canadian city of Calgary, and have since lived in Scotland, Germany, England, the USA and the Czech Republic. She studied at the Universities of St Andrews, Cambridge, and Chicago, and was a Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge. She then taught for 31 years in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge, before moving to the Chichele Professorship of Economic History at All Souls College Oxford in 2020.

Research Interests

She explores the lives of ordinary people in the past and try to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. She is particularly interested in how social institutions – the formal and informal constraints on economic activity – shaped economic development in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present day. In recent years her publications have analysed guilds, serfdom, communities, the family, gender, human capital investment, consumption, and state capacity.