Health and Welfare during Industrialization

Health and Welfare during Industrialization, edited by Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud. A National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 465 pp. $72.00.

The papers collected in Health and Welfare during Industrialization were originally presented at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference. The book includes nine contributed papers plus introductory and concluding chapters provided by the editors, R.H. Steckel and R. Floud. The original papers all address the circumstances of health and welfare during industrialization in eight countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia). As Floud and Steckel state in their introduction, the aim was not only to provide a comparative, international perspective on the standard of living debate among economic historians but primarily to expand the range of indicators of quality of life, to include more direct measures of health status. This is achieved largely by reliance on a parameter long the domain of physical anthropologists and human biologists: stature.

The first paper, by S.L. Egerman, frames the collection with an introduction to the historically vehement debate regarding standard of living during industrialization. This discussion also traces the evolution of measures used to evaluate economic change and welfare during industrialization, drawing attention to the main logistical, methodological, and theoretical problems with these attempts, including those using stature.

Subsequent papers present analyses of trends in stature, economic growth, and a variety of other indicators (economic, demographic, and anthropometric) for each of the eight countries. The concluding chapter by Steckel and Floud is commendable for its impressive synthesis of what is an overwhelming array of information from the individual papers. The editors acknowledge the distinct patterns of industrialization, each nation experiencing the process with different pace, timing, and circumstances. They reveal common patterns and attempt to clarify the variability in overall trends, proposing three explanatory mechanisms: (1) the timing of industrialization in each country vis-a-vis the public health movement and the rise of the germ theory of disease, (2) the degree of urbanization in each country, and (3) factors that affected diet and nutrition levels. Data from France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan suggest that these countries did not experience markedly declining living standards, as evidenced by relatively steadily increasing stature. Germany experienced temporary, short-lived stature declines, and the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia had more pronounced downward trends in stature during the course of industrialization. The major early industrializers, specifically, the United Kingdom and the United States, where significant economic and social change occurred substantially before the late nineteenth century advances in medicine and public health, appeared to pay a "biological penalty" (p. 433), manifested by prolonged trends of decreasing stature among men. Steckel and Floud further suggest that "no single indicator . . . adequately captures the diversity and complexity of the process" (p. 426); however, they are enthusiastic that inclusion of biologically based variables, especially stature, has greatly enhanced the previously myopic methods to assess human welfare during industrialization.

It can certainly be tricky to analyze and interpret anthropometric or demographic trends given the vagaries of historical data. There are issues of data quality and availability to contend with, and often it is only opportunistically (or serendipitously) that we are able to garner supporting evidence from other sources. Any of the strengths and weaknesses of these studies must be regarded in light of this reality. The contributors can be lauded for their attempts to synthesize data for a number of different variables and for thorough descriptions and discussions of their results. In what follows I highlight some of the noteworthy aspects of this collection, commenting also on obvious areas for further investigation.

Stature data from historical times commonly come from military records. Most of the papers do an adequate job of addressing the problems of representativeness and normality of such samples, although not all perform statistical tests or adjustments to counter biases in their data. Some have been able to complement their analyses with stature data for schoolchildren (e.g., R. Floud and B. Harris for the United Kingdom, G. Honda for Japan, and S. Twarog for Germany). This allows for generalizations beyond those for adult males and for a sex comparison of the standards of living during industrialization.

The paper by P. Johnson and S. Nicholas is the only one in this collection to deal explicitly with the lot of women (in the United Kingdom) during industrialization. The stature data come from a third source, convict and criminal records for English and Irish women. Johnson and Nicholas suggest that there is evidence of detrimental effects on the health and welfare of English women during the early stages of industrialization, especially for those in urban areas, speculating that preferential allocation of household resources to heads and male children in times of economic stress was the cause. Later on in the industrialization process, males and females appear to be affected in tandem by changing conditions. G. Whitwell et al. are able to make limited comparisons between male and female army recruits in Australia from the turn of the century and suggest that relatively more modest increases in female stature are indicative of differences in the nutritional, disease, and work environment of Australian women. The conclusions from these two papers are tantalizing and point clearly to an important area for further research.