THE PHYSICAL STATURE OF MEN IN 19^TH-CENTURY CHILE: ANOTHER CASE OF STAGNATION DURING AN EXPORT BOOM

Abstract

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.

Height of Male Prisoners in Santiago de Chile during the Nitrate Era: The Penalty of being Unskilled, Illiterate, Illegitimate and Mapuche

“…Although we are not analyzing the trend of mean heights through birth decades, our data also show height stagnation during the 1880s–1910s and a slight decline during the 1920s–1930s. This is very much in line with the main findings of the previous studies [ 5 , 6 , 7 ].…”

“…Regarding the descriptive statistics of some of the main variables we entered, it is worth mentioning that those with a university degree were, on raw average, 169.7 cm tall (listed as professionals in Table 1 ), around 3 cm taller than unskilled workers, this being one of the greatest differences ever reported for social groups in Chile. This is unsurprising as it has been documented that income inequality was increasing during our period of study, despite sustained economic growth [ 5 ]. It is intriguing, however, that unskilled manual workers were slightly taller than skilled manual workers, although only by 0.2 cm in raw averages.…”

“…Many of the Northern European families who emigrated to Chile after independence from Spain (i.e., from the 1820s) worked in trade related activities. Given that Chile’s economic growth during our period of analysis was fueled by booming exports, and that only the economic elite was in a position to take advantage of this nitrate boom [ 5 ], to which those of wealthy British and Germans descent belonged, we would expect that those with Northern European surnames, ceteris paribus, enjoyed better biological welfare than the bulk of the population. In other words, the substantial profits generated by booming exports did not filter down to benefit the population evenly.…”

“…The anthropometric history of Chile has now been well covered thanks to a plethora of articles recently published since the pioneering study of Nuñez and Pérez [ 1 ] five years ago, and covering an extensive period of cohorts born from the 1740s to the 1990s [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ]. Most of these studies rely on data from army (and navy) records and to a lesser extent from health surveys [ 2 , 8 ] and school records [ 1 ].…”

Inequality and Well-Being in Iberian and Latin American Regions Since 1820. New Approaches From Anthropometric History

“… 3 For Spain, see Cámara, Martínez-Carrión, Puche and Ramon-Muñoz (2019); Argentina, Salvatore (2019a); Chile, Llorca-Jaña, Araya, Navarrete and Droller (2019); Brazil, Franken (2019); Colombia, Meisel, Ramirez and Santos (2019); Mexico, López-Alonso and Vélez-Grajales (2019). …”