Height and health in late eighteenth-century England Hannaliis Jaadla, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Dept of Geography, University of Cambridge, and Estonian Institute for Population Studies, Tallinn University, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8569-347X Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3703-7689 Romola J. Davenport, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Dept of Geography, University of Cambridge, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6828-9846 Corresponding author: Romola Davenport: phone +44 07905 137520, fax +44 1223 333392 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure Department of Geography, University of Cambridge Downing Place Cambridge CB2 3EA U.K.
[email protected] Acknowledgements. The authors thank members of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population Structure and three anonymous referees for their very constructive comments, Sebastiaan Keibek for his generosity in allowing us to use his wealth measure, and Ellen Potter for research assistance. Funding. This work was funded by Wellcome Trust award 103322 to Prof. Richard Smith (University of Cambridge). 1 Abstract Adult stature has become a very widely used indicator of childhood nutritional status in historical populations, and may provide insights into health inequalities that are not discernible in mortality rates. However most pre-twentieth century British data on heights suffer from selection biases. Here we present unique evidence on adult male heights by occupation from an unbiased sample of adult males in Dorset in the years 1798–99.