DONDENA Seminar - Sheilagh Ogilvie

“Servanthood and the European Marriage Pattern, 1500-1900”

SPEAKER: Sheilagh Ogilvie (University of Oxford)

ABSTRACT:

The presence of servants, workers who resided in the households of their employers, is a central feature of the European Marriage Pattern, a demographic system sometimes viewed as favouring economic growth. This paper compiles available data on servanthood in a wide range of European societies between 1500 and 1900. These enable comparisons with other features of the European Marriage Pattern – marriage age, lifetime celibacy, and household complexity – across space and time. Both theoretical and historical considerations suggest that servanthood responded not just to demographic systems but also to many other factors. 

BIO:

Sheilagh Ogilvie is Chichele Professor of Economic History at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She explores the lives of ordinary people in the past and tries to explain how poor economies get richer and improve human well-being. She has written books about pre-modern industry, women’s work, long-distance trade, guilds, and epidemics. Her articles and essays range widely across serfdom, guilds, consumption, retailing, demography, gender, micro-finance, moral regulation, social capital, the growth of the state, and the economic role of institutions. Her work has been recognized by the Ranki Prize (1999, 2021), the Gindeley Prize (2004), the Kuczynski Prize (2004), and the Pech Prize (2008). She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024-7) to research and write a book on “Serfdom and Economic Development, c. 1000-1861”. Her latest book is Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid (Princeton, 2025).

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