Trends in the Economic Well-Being of South Indians under British Rule: The Anthropometric Evidence

Brennan, Lance; McDonald, John; Shlomowitz, Ralph

doi:10.1006/exeh.1994.1010

Cited by 31 publications

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“…Of course, not all height differentials are due to environmental conditions: African bushmen and pygmies, for example, spring to mind, but these groups account for only a small percentage of their respective nations' populations. Brennan et al, 1994aBrennan et al, , 1994bBrennan et al, , 1997Brennan et al, , 2000, that this bias was not strong in the South Asian case). Table 7.1 provides a snapshot assessment of the quality of the height indicators used here.…”

Section: Data Qualitymentioning

confidence: 94%

“…We have access to Indian height data for the early 20th century but also for birth cohorts dating as far back as the early 19th century (Brennan, McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1994a, 1994b. Although the latter studies are based on labourmigrant heights, which are not necessarily a representative sample of India's population, the authors offer persuasive arguments that these height estimates were equivalent to those of the population as a whole.…”

Section: Historical Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While no upward trend of any significance occurred in South Asia since the end of the 19th century, Southeast Asia experienced a slight upward trend; at the start of the period, average height in this region was at an even lower level than for its neighbours (Brennan, McDonald, Shlomowitz, 1994a, 1994bBaten, Stegl and van der Eng, 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

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How Was Life?

Baten

Blum²

2014

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This work is published on the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the oecD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the organisation or of the governments of its member countries This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. The statistical data for israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant israeli authorities. The use of such data by the oecD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem and israeli settlements in the West bank under the terms of international law. corrigenda to oecD publications may be found on line at: www.oecd.org/about/publishing/corrigenda.htm. © oecD, iiSH 2014You can copy, download or print oecD content for your own use, and you can include excerpts from oecD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgment of the source and copyright owner is given. all requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to rights@oecd.org. Requests for permission to photocopy portions of this material for public or commercial use shall be addressed directly to the copyright clearance center (ccc) at info@copyright.com or the centre français d'exploitation du droit de copie (cFc) at contact@cfcopies.com. We are very pleased today, more than a decade after the release of Maddison's seminal work, to renew our association with his legacy. We do so through a report that both connects with and departs from his contributions to economic history. It connects, due to the report's long-term, global perspective, covering the period 1820-2010. It departs by going beyond GDP to encompass a broader set of dimensions that shape people's living conditions, such as their wages, longevity, education, height and personal security, among others.The present volume represents the culmination of the efforts undertaken by a group of economic historians as part of an international, inter-disciplinary effort, the Clio-Infra project. We are releasing it in the context of the better life initiative, which was launched by the OECD Secretary-General, Angel Gurría, in 2011 (and multi-disciplinary) as angus Maddison has demonstrated in the past, such global datasets can be produced only after major efforts in peer-reviewed research and standardisation of the underlying national data. Therefore a collaborative effort is needed to deal with the complexities involved in gathering, systematising and analysing data from a wide variety of disparate sources. This requires teamwork, in which experts on various topics, regions and periods work together to create standardised datasets of key historical variables. This is the approach adopted by both The Maddison Project, which focuses on h...

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Section: Data Qualitymentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Historical Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Was Life?

Baten

Blum²

2014

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“…Consider a perfectly competitive economy in which there are three sectors: textiles (T), grain (G), and agricultural commodity 13 Anthropometric evidence on south Indian indentured workers suggests that living standards stagnated during the last half of the 19 th century (Brannan et al 1994).…”

Section: A Neo-ricardian Model Of Deindustrializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent

Clingingsmith

Williamson

2008

Explorations in Economic History

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India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18 th century, but by the middle of the 19 th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market, primarily toBritain. The ensuing deindustrialization was greatest c1750-c1860. We ask how much of India's deindustrialization was due to local supply-side forces --such as political fragmentation and a rising incidence of drought, and how much to world price shocks. An open, three-sector neo-Ricardian model organizes our thinking and new relative price database implements the empirical analysis. We find local supply side forces were important from as early as 1700. The size of Indian deindustrialization is then assessed by comparison with other parts of the periphery.

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“…However, distributional issues due to sample selection pose a more 2 See, for example, A 'Hearn, 2003;Baten, Ma, Morgan, & Wang, 2010;Brennan, McDonald, & Shlomowitz, 1994;Komlos, 2007;Moradi & Baten, 2005; R. Steckel, 1986;or Stegl & Baten, 2009. Steckel (2009 found more than 300 social science articles on stature that had been published since 1995.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selection and historical height data: Evidence from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation

Miller

2016

Explorations in Economic History

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Abstract:Economists have increasingly turned to height data to gain insight into a population's standard of living. Because height measures are used when other data is unavailable, testing their reliability can be difficult, and concerns over sample selection have lead to several vigorous debates within the heights literature. In this paper, I use a unique contemporaneous census to gauge the extent of selection into a contested sample of American Indian heights. I have linked people from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation to the 1890 Cherokee Census. An initial analysis finds evidence of negative selection into the Boas sample. A detailed examination of those measured reveals a more complex story. Two distinct groups are present within the data. The first group consists of 64 members of the Cherokee elite. Their households owned more land, had invested more in improvements to their land, and had higher literacy rates. The remainder of the Boas sample is poor relative to both the elite and the rest of the Cherokee Nation. Part, but not all, of this difference is due to their residential location. Forty percent of the Boas sample lived in poorest district of Cherokee Nation. These differences in wealth between the two groups were mirrored by a fairly dramatic difference in average heights. The average height of all men in elite group was 173.9 cm while the non-elite were several centimeters shorter at just 171.2 cm.

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Trends in the Economic Well-Being of South Indians under British Rule: The Anthropometric Evidence

Cited by 31 publications

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How Was Life?

How Was Life?

Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent

Selection and historical height data: Evidence from the 1892 Boas sample of the Cherokee Nation

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