Bringing home the bacon? Regional nutrition, stature, and gender in the industrial revolution¹

Abstract

The impact of changing diet and resultant nutrition on living standards over the industrial revolution has been much debated, yet existing data have enabled only general trends to be identified. We use data from Eden's survey of parishes in 1795 and the Rural Queries of 1834 to go beyond average calorie intake, instead focusing on micronutrients and quality of diet. From this we discern regional differences in diet. In 1795 these differences were related to the availability of common land and the nature of women's work. Diet in both periods also maps onto stature. Using five datasets on height, we observe a positive impact of diet in 1795 on men's, women's, and boy's heights. By 1834 the impact is less evident; for men it remained, for women and boys it either no longer existed or became negative. This may indicate the superseding of nutritional factors by environmental ones, but it also hints at the emergence of a different relationship between height and nutrition for women and children compared with men. We speculate that this points to a shift in the intra‐household allocation of resources, but challenge the notion that the emergence of male breadwinning automatically led to universal female disadvantage.

The intersections of industrialization: Variation in skeletal indicators of frailty by age, sex, and socioeconomic status in 18th‐ and 19th‐century England

“…Analyses of height and weight data from the industrial period suggest that adverse health outcomes associated with industrialization and urbanization were disproportionately borne by marginalized groups, such as working-class women and children (Horrell, Humphries, & Voth, 1998;Horrell, Meredith, & Oxley, 2009;Horrell & Oxley, 2012, 2016Johnson & Nicholas, 1995;Meredith & Oxley, 2015;Nicholas & Oxley, 1993). Historians suggest that declines in the heights and weights of working-class women may be related to their declining economic importance within the household and the larger economy.…”

Roots of the Industrial Revolution

“…Both of these exclude Monmouthshire, so we use Marshall's (1833) figure for 1750 population, and assume that illiteracy was the same there as in other counties of western England (21-25 per cent). Nutrition scores from 1795 are taken from Horrell and Oxley (2012). We interpolate values for two missing eastern counties of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire based on a penalized spline of values from 21 neighbouring counties.…”

“…Several recent papers have started to look at the geography of the Industrial Revolution in England, particularly Nuvolari, Verspagen and von Tunzelmann (2011) who analyse at the early diffusion of the steam engine, Horrell and Oxley (2012) who focus on nutrition, and Crafts and Wolf (2013) who examine the location of the cotton industry; but this is the first study to look at industrialization in general. The central role that we assign to human capability as a driving factor of the Industrial Revolution is in keeping with the rapidly growing Fetal Origins literature in Health and Development economics that stresses the lifelong impact on health, physical and cognitive development of childhood nutrition and exposure to disease: see Almond and Currie (2011) and Currie and Vogl (2013) for recent reviews.…”

The first poverty line? Davies' and Eden's investigation of rural poverty in the late 18th-century England

“…The first explores Davies' concept of 'tolerable 12 Muldrew (2011), Food, Energy, Table 3.16, p. 156 13 Horrell and Oxley (2012), 'Bringing home the bacon?' 14 Davies (1795), Labourers in Husbandry, p. 5.…”

“…5 1 make allowance for the energy derived from beer consumption, which is underrecorded in Eden and Davies budgets. 12 Horrell and Oxley (2012) have investigated the relationship between dietary quality and its impact on physical stature. They identify a positive relationship between regional diet and height in Eden's budgets, which had largely disappeared by the 1830s.…”