Introduction
For over half a century, quantitative economic historians have pondered the fates of workers and other segments in the population during the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
While everyone agrees that the standard of living eventually improved, much discussion has focused on how various groups fared during the decades that industrialization actually unfolded. Scholars of the subject have asked who gained and who lost in the process (and why), and whether industrialization was accompanied by events that adversely affected health and human welfare. In the case of England, debate has been particularly lively and factions have coalesced into camps of optimists and pessimists. Controversy persists because evidence about the past is often meagre and, in any event, health and human welfare are complex and difficult to assess under the best circumstances of data availability (for a discussion of issues, see Engerman 1997).This chapter places the debate over human welfare during industrialization in the context of very long-term economic developments by examining an important aspect of living standards—health and nutrition—since the early Middle Ages. I use average stature determined from military records along with average heights estimated from a neglected source, skeletal data.1 Average height measures a population's history of net nutrition—diet minus claims on the diet made by work and by disease.2 Considering the industrial period as a backdrop for comparative study, I describe the U- shape that average heights took over the past millennium in northern Europe and suggest a research agenda for analysing this remarkable time trend in health and nutrition.
2.