Historians and historical economists have made much progress during the past half century in reconstructing long-term patterns of economic growth. The development of national income accounting techniques provided measures of gross national product and gross national product per capita in both constant and current dollars for the United States and various other countries that extend back to the first half of the nineteenth century. By providing information on the overall performance of the economy and on the performance of its principal industrial sectors and geographic regions, these measures have succinctly characterized the pattern of economic change in the United States, England, France, and several other European nations for periods of up to a century and a half. They have provided a scale against which such developments as urbanization, technological change, and the impact of various governmental policies can be judged. The new information has often led to important reinterpretations of major historical eras. The discovery that the rate of growth of manufacturing declined during the Civil War decade, for example, led to a searching reexamination of the thesis that the Civil War gave an unprecedented impetus to the industrialization of the United States. The disaggregation of the national accounts to the state level produced the unanticipated finding that during the twenty years leading up to the Civil War the South grew at least as rapidly as the North.

To many historians, and to most of their students, the question of the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the poor of Britain has become confused, an arcane debate of ever greater statistical complexity. This is a pity, for “the most sustained single controversy in British economic history” still has, and should have, the capacity to excite and rouse the imagination, as it did for those who began, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Condition of England debate (Mathias, 1975: vii; Taylor, 1975: xi). For Friedrich Engels, Edwin Chadwick, John Stuart Mill, or Lord Shaftesbury, and for many who as government inspectors or members of local statistical societies provided the evidence, the condition of the working classes was something tangible, to be seen in the streets of Manchester or London, demonstrated in the faces and bodies of the artisans and laborers who walked those streets and worked in the workshops and factories. The moral outrage felt by Engels, Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Barnardo, and many others in the nineteenth century came from the sight not only of squalid living conditions but of the malnourished bodies of the poor themselves.

The military records used in this article, referred to as muster rolls or descriptive lists, are predominantly from the years of the French and Indian War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783), and pertain to the soldiers of the American Colonies. Such lists were compiled for most colonial military forces, typically by individual companies or regiments, and provided the basis for distributing supplies and payments, as well as for aiding in the identification of deserters. Since there was no standard format, the information appearing in the muster rolls varies widely. Lists have been retrieved that included for each soldier some, but never all, of the following information: place of birth, age, place of residence, occupation, height, hair color, eye color, complexion, place and date of enlistment, military rank, by whom enlisted, language spoken, term of service, pay scale, and assorted remarks relevant to military service. We have also colected a sample of U.S. Army muster rolls for those recruits who enlisted during the period 1815–1820. These lists are of a similar lature to those of the earlier era, except that they are much more uniform with regard to the information included. Very few individuals under the age of 16 enlisted in the military, making it difficult to utilize these data for studying adolescent growth spurts. Accordingly, the analysis of the height-by-age data in this article will focus on the terminal heights achieved.

Early nineteenth-century Trinidad was one of the most efficient sugar producers in the British West Indies with output per slave three times as high as in Barbados and 70% higher than in Jamaica (Ward, 1978; Ragatz, 1963:332). Slave prices reflected Trinidad’s greater productivity. The Commissioners of Compensation reported in 1837 that between 1822 and 1830 the price of a Trinidad field hand was 64% greater than the price of one in Jamaica (Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1837–1838).

Despite Trinidad’s natural advantages as a sugar producer, the island’s first sugar estate was established only in 1787. Spain controlled Trinidad until the British conquest in 1797 and prohibited non-Spanish settlement until 1783. The island’s population in 1783 consisted of only some one thousand Amerindians and an equal number of inhabitants of European or African descent who grew cocoa as well as subsistence crops. Rapid population growth began in 1783 when the Spanish opened the island to settlement by any Roman Catholic. French West Indian slave owners in particular took advantage of this opportunity to settle a nearly unpopulated island and brought the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee to Trinidad. The slave rebellion in Haiti sparked a still larger inflow of French planters and their slaves, and brought the slave population to over 10,000 in 1797 (Fraser, 1891; Carmichael, 1961; Anthony, 1975).

In recent years the nutritional adequacy of the slave diet has received increasing attention from historians. Scholars have analyzed a wide array of sources such as the manuscript censuses of agriculture and population, the ex-slave narratives, diaries, plantation account books, and agricultural and medical journals to shed new light on the quantities, varieties, and nutritional content of foods consumed by slaves (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Owens, 1976; Sutch, 1975; Kiple and Kiple, 1977; Savitt, 1978; Crawford, 1980; Kahn, 1983). While these studies have yielded considerable information on the average quality of the slave diet in the American South or for slaves in particular localities, relatively little systematic evidence has been available to date on how the level of nutrition varied among different groups in the slave population, and over time.

The diversity of opinions about the extent and importance of migration during the colonial era testifies to the paucity of direct information on the subject. Beyond the desire for a purely demographic explanation of the differences in regional rates of population growth, the need for a better understanding of the changes in the supply and distribution of labor before the Industrial Revolution has spurred recent research on internal migration. Some of this work has grown out of studies of the censuses and vital records of various New England towns (such as those cited in Jones, 1981). However, although these sources testify that an individual existed in a specific place and time, and thus provide valuable indirect glimpses of migration, they rarely furnish the information necessary to locate him or her a second time—either earlier or later in the life cycle. Names appear and disappear from such lists over time, but several intervening assumptions are required before we can infer that migration was involved. Similarly, although differences in sex ratios and age distributions reflect the movement of population, they reveal little about the absolute magnitude or direction of net migration, let alone gross flows.

Auxology, the study of physical growth (from auxein, to increase), has long been pressed into service as a measure of human welfare. In the sixteenth century Levinus Lemnius, doctor and later priest in the Low Countries, castigated “schoolmasters and others that take upon them to teach and boord young boyes (and) pinch their poore Pupils and Boorders by the belly, and allow them meate neither sufficient nor yet wholesome.” “Whereby it cometh to passe,” he continued,