INEQUALITY AND WELL-BEING IN IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN REGIONS SINCE 1820. NEW APPROACHES FROM ANTHROPOMETRIC HISTORY

Abstract

After four decades of research in anthropometric history, the use of human stature to measure changes in standards of living and inequality has become widespread among economic historians (Blum, 2013; Galofré-Vilà, 2018). In close collaboration with economists, physical anthropologists and biologists, economic historians have shown that stature and other bodily measures, such as weight, robustness, and corporal mass, have been influenced by environmental and socio-economic determinants over long periods of time and across different geographies. Adult height is a good proxy of human welfare, to the extent that it correlates with health, longevity, nutrition, and economic growth, and inform about the evolution of net-nutritional status and biological wellbeing for different social classes, ethnic groups, and sub-groups within the population (Komlos and Kelly, 2016). Anthropometric history is a well-established discipline in Iberian and Latin American regions. The need to have alternative measures of the standard of living in order to explore the past evolution of economies and societies when conventional indicators were not available has been an important consideration among researchers. In an effort to reconstruct historical series of stature, scholars of the region have produced over a hundred studies that combine insights from history, economics, medicine, biology, and physical anthropology. In the last fifteen years, the anthropometric history literature has increased remarkably with important findings