experienced a decline in height in the period 1820-1850, were comparatively taller with a measure of 165-166 cm.36 Only the industrial-backward Japan shows height levels that are below those estimated for Saxony for the period around 1850 (Honda, 1997). The causes for such a negative record are multiple and resemble to a large extent those individuated for Britain. In particular, we believe that the timing of industrialization and the extent of urbanization played a major role in shaping the Saxon nutritional status between 1815 and 1850.37 In fact, much before the rise and acceptance of the germ theory of disease—which can be dated around the 1880s—Saxony was already experiencing a fairly rapid industrial growth accompanied by high levels of urbanization and very high levels of population density. More than one-third of the Saxon population lived in an urban centre during the early industrialization period. We found that in Dresden and in the rapidly growing town of Chemnitz there was a significant penalty in terms of nutritional status. Precarious hygienic conditions, lower food quality and higher prices are the usual suspects for such height disadvantage. On the contrary, countries which experienced the early phase of industrialization with relatively low levels or urbanization—notably France and Sweden—had height trends which diverge from what has been found for Saxony. In 1850, the share of urban population in France was 26 percent (Weir, 1997) and only 10 percent in Sweden (Sandberg and Steckel, 1988), while in Saxony in the same period it was already above 30 percent.38 Additionally, Saxony had also a very high population density, due also to the exogenous change of the country borders commanded by the Congress of Vienna, which might have favored the spread of communicable diseases.39
The diet is another element which has to be considered when evaluating the causes of nutritional status. We suggest that the redefinition of the Saxon borders with the transfer of agricultural territories to Prussia partly contributed to the deterioration of the average nutritional status. In fact, Saxony encountered increasing difficulties in meeting a rising demand for food and became more
36 See Floud et al. (1990).
37 Steckel and Floud (1997).
38 Swedish people, due also to their high level of literacy, were more sensitive to government propaganda in favor of breast-feeding and general public health (Sandberg and Steckel, 1997).
39 In this sense it is also important to note the role played the river Elbe which connected Dresden with the market of Hamburg.
dependent on food imports which came mainly from the neighboring Bohemia, Prussia, and Hamburg. The agrarian reform in 1832 and the participation in the customs union (Zollverein) few years later re-directed the import channels but the problem of dependence on food import persisted (Kiesewetter, 1988). In this respect, we provide some evidence about the increase in the relative price of food that took place in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth-century.
The importance of the quality of nutrients was shown by Weir (1997) for the case of France. He showed that another reason at the basis of the increase in French heights during the nineteenth-century was the parallel increase in meat consumption. Klasen (1998) provides evidence of a decline in livestock production in Germany: Meat consumption declined by ca. 35 percent between 1770 and 1800 reaching its lowest point at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.40 Only after 1850 livestock production started to rise again. Evidence of a poor diet in Saxony is witnessed by the large production of potatoes which followed the country-borders-redefinition. Potato crops made up to 22 percent of the food production in 1810; in the middle of the nineteenth-century the share was above 50 percent (Kiesewetter, 1988).
Another factor that was shown to be an important determinant of height is the availability of milk. Regression analysis shows that in areas with higher availability of milk average heights were significantly superior (Baten, 2001;
Baten and Murray, 2000; Baten and Fertig, 2005). As mentioned, the Saxon industrialization process was characterized by a high level of urbanization and, already in 1850, by an extremely high share of people employed in industry (45 percent). This meant that, as industrialization advanced, always fewer people had access to a high-protein nutrient such as milk. In fact, it was only towards the end of the nineteenth-century that milk could be traded and consumed in higher quantities by the urban workers. Therefore, the lack of milk in the diet of an increasing share of population in conjunction with the decrease in meat consumption played a role in the decline in heights during the Saxon early-industrialization phase.
The occupational differentials in height estimated here are similar in magnitude to those found by Twarog (1997) for Württemberg 1850-1939: In that
40 The decline in livestock production in favor of grain production in Germany was probably due to the phenomenon of the enclosures (Klasen, 1998).
case the difference between upper and working class was circa 5.8 cm.41 Similarly, A’Hearn finds for pre-unification Italy that educated people had circa 4 cm advantage with respect to blacksmiths or people employed in the textile sector. Floud et al. (1990), on the contrary, found very small occupational differentials for British soldiers born between 1815 and 1850. The absolute difference in height between the tallest category (white collars) and the lowest (domestic servants) did not reach 1 cm. In addition, they found that occupational differentials converged toward zero in the period 1750-1850, a finding which contrasts with our results for Saxony. In fact, our new estimates suggest a rise in inequality across the two centuries. The difference in height between officers and infantrymen increased from 3.8 cm in the eighteenth-century to 4.2 cm in the nineteenth-century; even more striking, while in the eighteenth-century only those with direct access to food had a significant nutritional advantage, in the first half of the nineteenth-century the difference in height between educated and unskilled people amounted to circa 4.5 cm denoting a significant increase in inequality. Dumke (1988) found rising income inequality for the period after the German unification in 1871. Our estimates suggest that the increase in inequality might have started in the first half of the nineteenth-century.
41 Twarog (1997) can also control for father’s occupation. The occupational differentials quoted here are for soldiers with the same occupation of the fathers.
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