Anthropometric History: What Is It?

John Komlos

Anthropometric history was born in the mid-1970s in conjunction with efforts by economists to quantify changes in the standard of living during the course of the last two hundred years in economies for which more conventional measures of welfare, such as GNP per capita, were either not available or were controversial.  In contrast to the standard of real wages, anthropometric evidence is plentiful, and has the additional advantage of being available for groups—such as children, housewives, subsistence peasants, aristocrats, and slaves—for whom conventional economic concepts either do not apply, or do not always apply (2). 

The first results of this methodology showed that American soldiers at the time of the Revolutionary War were two inches taller than British soldiers of the same age.  That is to say, the nutritional advantages of the New World were already evident in the eighteenth century.  More startling still was the result pertaining to the most deprived of Americans, that is, those of African origin.  The stature of slaves indicates that they were well-nourished as young adults, although not as children.  Adult slave men reached a height of 67 inches, within one inch of northern-born whites, and above contemporary European norms.  In fact, their physical stature was closer to that of European aristocrats than to European peasants.  In spite of their social degradation, blacks born in the New World were consistently taller than their African-born brethren.  This was true in the eighteenth century as well as in the nineteenth, and it indicates vividly the abundant availability of food supplies in the New World (3). 

The European results were equally noteworthy.  It is one thing to tell students that a rise in bread prices caused food riots in the late eighteenth century, but it is yet another to be able to assert that the “Oliver Twists” of London were so malnourished that there is hardly a civilized population in the world today of comparable stature.  It is one thing to speak of a skewing of the income distribution at the turn of the nineteenth century in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and yet another to be able to show that, at age thirteen, the gentry boys in the elite Sandhurst Royal Military Academy were nineteen centimeters (almost eight inches) taller than their compatriots in the slums of London (4). 

We knew how unhealthy pre-industrial and early industrial towns were, but one can now show that whether one considers Baltimore, Vienna, London, or Tokyo, the further one lived from these urban centers, the higher were the chances of reaching one’s genetic potential height.  Put another way, being close to the source of nutrients or being self-sufficient in food production had distinct biological advantages in the early-industrial period.  Whereas in modern market societies there generally is a positive correlation between height and per capita income, this has not always been the case.  Until the twentieth century, rural populations were invariably taller than urban ones, and underdeveloped regions tended to have better nourished populations than developed areas.  The Irish, for instance, enjoyed a higher level of nutritional status than the industrial English, and the Hungarians were taller than the Czechs.  In America, Southerners were better nourished than Northerners.  In the 1830s, farmers in America were taller than urban professionals.  In other words, the propinquity to food supplies was one of the most important factors in determining one’s nutritional well-being.  At the aggregate level, higher per capita output of food was more important in determining nutritional status than was real money income, because individuals who purchased their food had to pay for transportation costs and for the efforts of middlemen, whereas subsistence farmers did not.  Hence, in the early industrial era one often finds a negative relationship between food consumption and the level of industrialization.  This also meant that market integration and the expansion of urban markets posed a potential threat to nutritional status by altering the terms of trade of the agricultural sector (5). 

The  importance  of anthropometric history is accentuated by the debate over the course of the standard of living during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution,  when food consumption still accounted for as much as three-fourths of total income among the lower classes.  The anthropo-metric approach has the advantage of sidestepping the dispute over the accuracy of real wage indices and a host of related problems, such as how to convert hourly wages adequately into annual family incomes.

In this regard, the most interesting findings are related to cycles in human height.  The first recorded downturn took place in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century and another occurred in America during the Antebellum decades.  Both were accompanied by rapid population growth, urbanization, and the expansion of the industrial sector.  In both instances the relatively slow growth of the agricultural labor force and the absence of technological breakthroughs in food production, coupled with the increased urban demand for food, meant that the price of nutrients increased both absolutely and relatively to industrial products.

In antebellum America for example, the urban population practically doubled every decade, while the agricultural labor force grew by less than ten percent per decade.  It is little wonder that food prices rose in real terms and that both calorie and protein consumption declined.  The average  eighteen-year-old  student entering the West Point Military Academy weighed just under 128 pounds.  Twenty-five percent of the cadets were under 110 pounds in their late teenage years.  This is less than the weight of girls today.  Thus, in spite of the very rapid economic growth of the Antebellum decades, and in spite of the fact that per capita national income increased by forty percent between 1840 and 1870, the physical stature of the American population declined during the same period.  These hidden costs of industrialization in resource abundant America are now becoming evident, due in large part, to anthropometric history.

In the European context, the relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the well-being of the societies experiencing it has long been a controversial issue, known to historians as “the standard of living debate.”  Anthropometric historians have recently been able to transform the debate in its essentials.  It has now been shown that the diminution in human stature preceded the onset of industrialization of the second half of the eighteenth century, and therefore the decline in well-being could not have been caused by the Industrial Revolution.  It is true that the standard of living continued to deteriorate even after the Industrial Revolution began.  This pattern has misled many scholars into thinking that there was a causal relationship between the Industrial Revolution and the decline in the living standards of the lower classes.  Instead, it now becomes clear that the cause was the demographic expansion that began in Europe around the 1730s (prior to the Industrial Revolution).  It is plausible, moreover, to suppose that the expansion of the industrial sector arrested the further deterioration in the well-being of the society by generating additional income which could be used to import nutrients.  Without the Industrial Revolution, the nutritional status of the population would probably have deteriorated further, and growth impulses would have been dissipated  once  again  by  Malthusian population pressures as they had in the fourteenth century, and as they had more recently in the seventeenth century.

Thus, conventional measures of living standards such as real wages or the level of gross domestic product per capita, have misled scholars concerned with the impact of industrialization and economic development on the standard of living.  The ultimate culprit turns out to be not the Industrial Revolution, but the demographic revolution.  It is true that the Industrial Revolution was unable to counterbalance the Malthusian pressures in the short run and could only do so in the long run.  But one can demonstrate the incredible improvements in living standards over the last two centuries by showing, for example, that the height of lower-class thirteen-year-old English boys increased by nearly twenty centimeters between 1790 and 1990.  Most of the increase, to be sure, was confined to the last hundred years, partly in response to improvements in public health in urban areas.

Has this line of research generated new knowledge?  I think so.  It has explored the gender-specific nature of the trends in living standards, an aspect of the debate that has been all but neglected until now.  For example, several studies have shown that females were often affected earlier than males by a nutritional downturn.  The approach has also shown that illiterate men were shorter than literate ones.  It has demonstrated the existence of anthropo-metric cycles which were not known to exist previously.  We now know about the nutritional deprivation of slave children, and of their catch-up growth in the late teens.  We know more about the great gulf that divided the Old World from the New in terms of nutritional standards.  We know that African-Americans were taller than Africans in Africa.  We now know that German aristocrats were taller than middle-class Germans, and that the English gentry enjoyed a higher standard of living than their German counterparts who, in turn, were better off than Austrian nobles.  It has been shown that the biological standard of living can diverge from more conventional indicators of well being during the early stages of industrialization, and per capita income can be an ambiguous measure of welfare during some phases of growth.  These are noteworthy contributions both to social history as well as to economic history. 
 
 

1. John Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsbury Monarchy: An Anthro-pometric History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).  Chapter 1. 
2. Robert W. Fogel, “Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality since 1700; Some Preliminary Findings,” in Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (eds.), Long Term Factors in American Economic Growth.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.  National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol 51, pp. 439-555. 
3. Richard Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity,” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986), pp. 721-741; John Komlos, “Height and Social Status in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20 (1990): 607-621. 
4. Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).  5.  Joel Mokyr and Cormac O. Grada, “Poor and Getting Poorer? Living Standards in Ireland before the Famine,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 41 (1988): 209-235. 

John Komlos is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.