This article provides the first series of adult male height for 19th-century Chile. Our aim was not only to assess the trends indicated by height during this period, but also the relationship between stature and both GDP per capita and exports. Having analysed our data, our primary conclusion is that there was a reduction in height for cohorts born in the 1850s and 1860s with respect to cohorts born between 1820 and 1840. Height stagnated thereafter, with small to no improvement towards the end of the 19th century, in line with other Latin American countries for which there is comparable evidence. The increase in per capita GDP and exports during the second half of the century did not result in better biological welfare, as was the case in other Latin American countries during similar export booms.

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This article assesses agricultural market income inequality by examining three untapped comprehensive agricultural censuses of all of Chile, undertaken in 1834, 1838 and 1852. Since there had been no Chilean income inequality measurements prior to 1860, this is a novel contribution. Given Chile’s great dependence on the agricultural sector during the pre-industrial period of the 1830s to 1850s, measures of agricultural market income inequality can safely be taken as a proxy for total income inequality. This study found that agricultural market income inequality was extremely high during the first decades after Chilean independence. Gini coefficients for agricultural market income among landowners were 0.75, 0.75 and 0.79 for 1834, 1838 and 1852 respectively, while the figures for the entire rural Chilean population, including the landless, were 0.79, 0.87, and 0.89. Around 85% of the population did not own any land and for an unskilled labourer to rent a plot of 1,500 hectares in 1834 cost 3.3 years of wages, and annual wages of 11.3 in 1838. In a conclusion that is at odds with previous historiographical findings, our data suggest that inequality in Chile was very high and had begun to increase decades before the first globalization.

We provide the first estimates of gender income and land inequality in Chile during the first decades after independence, when Chile was a predominantly agrarian society. We have used a new source: the records of the first agricultural censuses ever made for any Latin American republic. We found that there were over six times more male landowners than women, and that male owners gathered up to 87% of total agricultural income (of those paying the catastro). On the positive side, we found that female landownership was more widespread than has previously been assumed by Chilean historians, although it was declining in relative terms. We have also identified the main elite women agrarian entrepreneurs, finding that one of the biggest landowners of this period was a woman, who has been ignored in the historiography. We have documented her economic activities, as well as those of many other prominent women agricultural entrepreneurs, thus showing that women's involvement in crucial entrepreneurship activities started earlier than previously been acknowledged, from colonial times.

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Analysis of a sample of around 4,600 women born between the 1860s and the 1990s finds that the height of adult females increased by about 5 cm, primarily from the 1860s to the 1880s and during the second half of the twentieth century—representing the greatest known improvement in women’s biological welfare in Chilean history. Chilean women have never been as tall as they are today. The secular height increase was higher for men than for women, but only slightly. The increasing sexual dimorphism in stature since the 1920s (achieving its highest value ever during the 1990s) suggests that male stature is more sensitive than female stature to changes in environmental conditions. Adult female heights also correlate with positive gradients in literacy and occupational status, and negative height differentials are in evidence between the native (Mapuche) population and the population with European ancestry.