Background
Although lacking survey results on the subject, I suspect that few scholars would challenge whether the substantial resources allocated to the standard of living debate have been worthwhile investments as a whole.
No doubt, many would object to some books or papers, but all would recognize that industrialization has been the biggest news of the past two centuries on the economic front. Unquestionably, industrialization transformed social and economic life, and even poor groups within modern industrial countries have greater access to most types of material goods and live longer lives than the upper classes in the pre-industrial era. Study of industrialization is also warranted for insights that may help guide developing countries now undergoing the process.Considerable devotion to the subject of welfare during industrialization is justified, but the neglect of the pre-industrial era is curious. The lack of attention cannot be explained by a supposition that industrialization was the only major dynamic feature of social and economic life over the past several millennia. Earlier transformations were arguably on par if not more significant, including the shift from foraging to farming, the rise of cities, and European expansion and colonization that began in the 1400s.
The neglect might be explained by temporal distance from the present, a forceful point among those scholars who believe that modern policy implications should flow from the work of most if not all economists, including economic historians. People of this persuasion may ask what could possibly be learned about problems in the modern world by studying the pre-industrial era. In reply, one might observe that the pre-industrial world of the past is relevant because parts of today's developing regions approximate pre-industrial conditions of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
More importantly, study of pre-industrial economies is justifiable as a form of basic research. All social scientists understand the value of large, diverse samples for generalizing about human behaviour, and the past is certainly diverse. In any event, economic historians, and historians, are seldom beholden to arguments that research must demonstrate immediate applications. Many are content in viewing research purely as consumption, or satisfying desires of intellectual curiosity.On a practical level, data availability is a problem, at least for the type of monetary measures that economists are accustomed to using, such as real GDP, real wages, or wealth. While it is certainly not true that abundant data exist for the taking, it is also not true that evidence is completely lacking. Over the years I have been impressed by the ingenuity of historians and economists in developing new data resources, a record that leads one to doubt whether most useful sources have been exploited. Recently, the frontiers of research were extended backward in time and over space, at least in the dimension of wages and prices (Allen 2001).
Finally, new data sources and methods have been developed for assessing human welfare. Speaking metaphorically, one may think of the history of human welfare in a country or region as a long sausage or salami; each slice represents a year (or other
time unit) of social performance that can be divided into broad categories of health, material goods, and psychological elements, which may have spiritual or metaphysical components. The example of the new anthropometric history shows that a significant portion of the health component is measurable from military records and other sources of height data (Steckel 1998). Skeletal evidence greatly extends backward in time the portion of the salami that is visible, broadens it to include women and children, and unlike stature alone, includes information on degenerative health processes associated with hard work and ageing. This chapter makes a small down-payment on the larger research agenda of integrating the analysis of pre-industrial height data from skeletal records and military sources into the literature of economic history.
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