MISERY DURING THE XVIII AND XIX CENTURIES

It is now clear that although the period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth has been hailed justly as an industrial revolution, as a great transformation in social organization, and as a revolution in science, these great advances brought only modest and uneven improvements in the health, nutritional status, and longevity of the lower classes before 1890. Whatever contribution the technological and scientific advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have made ultimately to this breakthrough, escape from hunger and high mortality did not become a reality for most ordinary people until the twentieth century. This point can be demonstrated by looking first at the amount of food available to the typical worker in England and France during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because at that time food constituted between 50 and 75 percent of the expenditures of laboring families, improvement in the conditions of their lives should have been evident in their diets. However, Table 1.2 shows that the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the eighteenth century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year in the tables of the World Bank. England’s supply of food per capita exceeded that of France by several hundred calories but was still exceedingly low by current standards. Indeed, as late as 1850, the English availability of calories hardly matched the current Indian level.

The supply of food available to ordinary French and English families between 1700 and 1850 was not only meager in amount but also relatively poor in quality. In France between 1700 and 1850, for example, the share of calories from animal foods was less than half of the modern share, which is about one-third in rich nations. In 1750 about 20 percent of English caloric consumption was from animals. That figure rose to between 25 and 30 percent in 1750 and 1800, suggesting that the quality of the English diet increased more rapidly than that of the French during the eighteenth century.  However, although the English were able to increase their diet in bulk, its quality subsequently diminished, with the share of calories from animals falling back to 20 percent in 1850.16 One implication of these low-level diets needs to be stressed: Even prime-age males had only a meager amount of energy available for work. By work I mean not only the work that gets counted in national income and product accounts (which I will call “NIPA work”), but also all activity that requires energy over and above baseline maintenance. Baseline maintenance has two components.
The larger component is the basal metabolic rate (or BMR), which accounts for about four-fifths of baseline maintenance. It is the amount of energy needed to keep the heart and other vital organs functioning when the body is completely at rest. It is measured when an individual is at complete rest, about 12 to 14 hours after the last meal.17 The other 20 percent of baseline maintenance is the energy needed to eat and digest food and for vital hygiene. It does not include the energy needed to prepare a meal or to clean the kitchen afterward. It is important to keep in mind that not all goods and services produced in a society are included in the NIPA. When the NIPA were first designed in the early 1930s, they were intended to measure mainly goods and services traded in the market. It was, for example, recognized that many important contributions to the economy, such as the unpaid labor of housewives, would not be measured by the NIPA. However, the neglect of nonmarket activities was to a large extent made necessary by the difficulty in measuring them given the quantitative techniques of the time. Moreover, with a quarter of the labor force unemployed in 1932, Congress was most concerned about what was happening to market employment. It was also assumed that the secular trend in the ratio of market to nonmarket work was more or less stable. This last assumption turned out to be incorrect. Over time, NIPA work has become a smaller and smaller share of total activities. Furthermore, we now have the necessary techniques to provide fairly good estimates of nonmarket activities. Hence in these chapters I will attempt to estimate the energy requirements of both market and nonmarket work. Dietary energy available for work is a residual. It is the amount of energy metabolized (chemically transformed for use by the body) during a day, less baseline maintenance. Table 1.3 shows that in rich countries today, around 1,800 to 2,600 calories of energy are available for work to an adult male aged 20–39. Note that calories for females, children, and the aged are converted into equivalent males aged 20–39, called “consuming units,” to standardize the age and sex distributions of each population

This means that if females aged 15–19 consume on average 0.78 of the calories consumed on average by males aged 20–39, they are considered 0.78 of a male aged 20–39, insofar as caloric consumption is concerned, or 78 percent of a consuming unit. During the eighteenth century, France produced less than onefifth of the current U.S. amount of energy available for work. Once again, eighteenth-century England was more prolific, providing more than a quarter of current levels, a shortfall of well over 1,000 calories per day. Only the United States provided energy for work equal to or greater than current levels during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When interpreting Table 1.3, it should not be assumed that work actually performed on a given day was always exactly equal to the ingested energy not used for maintenance. Work on any day can exceed or fall short of the amount allowed by the residual. If actual work requirements fall short of that made possible by the residual, the unused energy will be stored in the body as fat. If actual work exceeds the residual, the body will provide the energy from fat stores or from lean body mass.
Among impoverished populations today, work during busy seasons is often sustained by drawing on the body’s stores of energy and then replenishing these stores during slack seasons. However, when such transactions are large, they can be a dangerous way of providing the energy needed for work. Although the body has a mechanism that tends to spare the lean mass of vital organs from such energy demands, the mechanism is less than perfect and some of the energy demands are met from vital organs, thus undermining their functioning. Some investigators concerned with the link between chronic malnutrition and morbidity and mortality rates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have focused only on the harm done to the immune system. The now famous table of nutrition sensitive infectious diseases published in Hunger and History in 1983 stressed the way that some infectious diseases are exacerbated by the undermining of the immune system.18 Unfortunately, some scholars have misinterpreted this table, assuming that only the outcome of a narrow list of so-called nutritionally sensitive infectious diseases is affected by chronic malnutrition. Both the prevalence and mortality rates of chronic diseases, such as congestive heart failure, can be affected by seriously impairing the physical functioning of the heart muscles, the lungs, the gastrointestinal tract, or some other vital organ systems other than the immune system. I will return to this issue in subsequent chapters. An important implication of Table 1.2 needs to be made explicit. Today the typical American male in his early thirties is about 177 cm (69.7 inches) tall and weighs about 78 kg (172 pounds). Such a male requires daily about 1,794 calories for basal metabolism and a total of 2,279 calories for baseline maintenance.19 If either the British or the French had been that large during the eighteenth century, virtually all of the energy produced by their food supplies would have been required for maintenance, and hardly any would have been available to sustain work. The relatively small food supplies available to produce the national products of these two countries about 1700 suggest that the typical adult male must have been quite short and very light. This inference is supported by data on stature and weight that have been collected for European nations. Table 1.4 provides estimates of the final heights of adult males who reached maturity between 1750 and 1975. It shows that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans were severely stunted by modern standards (cf. line 6 of Table 1.4).

Sources and notes Table 1.4: Lines 1–5: Great Britain: all entries were computed from data in Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990. Norway: Floud 1984a, who cites Kiil 1939. Kiil estimated the height of recruits who were age 18.5 in 1761 at 159.5 cm, to which I added 4.4 cm to obtain the estimated final height 163.9 for 18-III. Sweden: Sandberg and Steckel 1987, Table 1. Decades straddling quarter centuries were given one-half the weight of decades fully within a quarter century. France: rows 3–5 were computed from von Meerton 1989 as amended by Weir 1993, with 0.9 cm added to allow for additional growth between age 20 and maturity (Gould 1869: 104–5; cf. Friedman 1982, p. 510 n. 14). The entry for row 2 is derived from a linear extrapolation of von Meerton’s data for 1815–36 back to 1788, with 0.9 cm added for additional growth between age 20 and maturity. Denmark: the entries are from Floud 1984a, who reported data analyzed by H. C. Johansen in 1982 and communicated privately. Hungary: all entries are from Komlos 1989, Table 2.1, p. 57. Line 6: the entry for Great Britain is from Rona, Swan, and Altman 1978, Table 3. The entries for Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are from Chamla 1983, Tables VII, XII, and XIV. Norwegian and Swedish heights are for 1965, Danish heights are for 1964. The entries for France and Hungary are from Eveleth and Tanner 1976, p. 284 (cf. p. 277).


Could the English and French of the eighteenth century have coped with their environment without keeping average body size well below what it is today? How Europeans of the past adapted their size to accommodate their food supply is shown by Table 1.5, which compares the average daily consumption of calories in England and Wales in 1700 and 1800 by two economic sectors: agriculture and everything else. Within each sector the estimated amount of energy required for work is also shown. Line 3 presents a measure of the efficiency of the agricultural sector in the production of dietary energy. That measure is the number of calories of food output per calorie of work input.20 Column 1 of the table presents the situation in 1800, when calories available for consumption were quite high by prevailing European standards (about 2,933 calories per consuming unit daily), when adult male stature made the British the tallest national population in Europe (about 168 cm or 66.1 inches at maturity) and relatively heavy by the prevailing European standards, averaging about 61.5 kg (about 136 pounds) at prime working ages, which implies a body mass index (BMI) of about 21.8.  The BMI, a measure of weight standardized for height, is computed as the ratio of weight in kilograms to height in meters squared. Food was relatively abundant by the standards of 1800 because, in addition to substantial domestic production, Britain imported about 13 percent of its dietary consumption. However, as column 1 indicates, British agriculture was quite productive. English and Welsh farmers produced over 20 calories of food output (net of seeds, feed, inventory losses, etc.) for each calorie of their work input. About 44 percent of this output was consumed by the families of the agriculturalists.21

The balance of their dietary output, together with some food imports, was consumed by the nonagricultural sector, which constituted about 64 percent of the English population in 1801.22 Although food consumption per capita was about 6 percent lower in this sector than in agriculture, most of the difference was explained by the greater caloric demands of agricultural labor. Food was so abundant compared to France that even the English paupers and vagrants, who accounted for about 20 percent of the population c.1800, had about three times as much energy for begging and other activities beyond maintenance as did their French counterparts.23 The food situation was tighter in 1700, when only about 2,724 calories were available daily per consuming unit. The adjustment to the lower food supply was made in three ways. First, the share of dietary energy made available to the nonagricultural sector in 1700 was a third lower than was the case a century later. That constraint necessarily reduced the share of the labor force of 1700 engaged outside of agriculture. Second, the amount of energy available for work per equivalent adult worker was lower in 1700 than in 1800, both inside and outside agriculture, although the shortfall was somewhat greater for nonagricultural workers. Third, the energy required for basal metabolism and maintenance was lower in 1700 than in 1800 because people were smaller.  Compared with 1800, adult heights of males in 1700 were down by 3 cm, their BMI was about 21 instead of 22, and their weights were down by about 4 kg. Constriction of the average body size reduced the number of calories required for maintenance by 105 calories per consuming unit daily. The last figure may seem rather small. However, it accounts for half of the total shortfall in daily caloric consumption.24 That figure is large enough to sustain the proposition that variations in body size were a principal means of adjusting the population to variations in the food supply. The condition for a population to be in equilibrium with its food supply at a given level of consumption is that the labor input (measured in calories of work) is large enough to produce the requisite amount of food (also measured in calories). Moreover, a given reduction in calories required for maintenance will have a multiplied effect on the number of calories that can be made available for work in the national income sense.
The multiplier is the inverse of the labor force participation rate (workers per person in the population). Since only about 35 percent of equivalent adults were in the labor force, the potential daily gain in calories for NIPA work was not 105 calories per equivalent adult worker but 300 calories per equivalent adult NIPA worker.25 The importance of the last point is indicated by considering columns 2 and 3 of Table 1.5. Column 2 shows that the daily total of dietary energy used for NIPA work in 1700 was 1,596 million calories, with 913 million expended in agriculture and the balance in nonagriculture. Column 3 indicates what would have happened if all the other adjustments had been made but body size remained at the 1800 level, so that maintenance requirements were unchanged.  The first thing to note is that energy available for food production would have declined by 15 percent. Assuming the same input/output ratio and amount of imports, the national supply of dietary energy would have declined to 9,718 million calories, of which over 70 percent would have been consumed within the agricultural sector. The residual available for nonagriculture would not even have covered the requirements of that sector for basal metabolism, leaving zero energy for NIPA work in nonagriculture. In this example, the failure to have constrained body size would have reduced the energy for NIPA work by about 51 percent.26

Varying body size was a universal way that the chronically malnourished populations of Europe responded to food constraints. However, even the United States, which was awash in calories compared with Europe, suffered from serious chronic malnutrition, partly because the high rate of exposure to infectious diseases prevented many of the calories that were ingested from being metabolized and partly because of the large share of dietary energy expended in NIPA work. Figure 1.2 summarizes the available data on U.S. trends in stature (which is a sensitive indicator of the nutritional status and health of a population) and in life expectancy since 1720. Both series contain striking cycles. They both rise during most of the eighteenth century, attaining substantially greater heights and life expectancies than prevailed in England during the same period. Life expectancy began to decline during the 1790s and continued to do so for about half a century. A new rise in heights, the one with which we have long been familiar, probably began with cohorts born during the last decade of the nineteenth century and continued down to the present.27 Figure 1.2 reveals not only that Americans achieved modern heights by the middle of the eighteenth century, but also that they reached levels of life expectancy not attained by the general population of England or even by the British peerage until the first quarter of the twentieth century. Similar cycles in height appear to have occurred in Europe. For example, Swedish heights declined by 1.4 cm between the third and fourth quarters of the eighteenth century. Hungarian heights declined more sharply (2.4 cm) between the third quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. There also appears to have been regular cycling in English final heights (heights at maturity) throughout the nineteenth century, although the amplitude of these cycles was more moderate than those of the United States or Hungary. A second height decline, which was accompanied by a rise in the infant mortality rate, occurred in Sweden during the 1840s and 1850s.28 This evidence of cycling in stature and mortality rates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both Europe and America is puzzling to some investigators. The overall improvement in health and longevity during this period is less than might be expected from the rapid increases in per capita income indicated by national income accounts for most of the countries in question. More puzzling are the decades of sharp decline in height and life expectancy, some of which occurred during eras of undeniably vigorous economic growth.29 The prevalence of meager diets in much of Europe, and the cycling of stature and mortality even in a country as bountiful in food as the United States, shows how persistent misery was down almost to the end of the nineteenth century and how diverse were the factors that prolonged misery. It is worth noting that during the 1880s Americans were slightly shorter than either the English or the Swedes, but a century earlier the Americans had had a height advantage of 5 to 6 cm over both groups. This conflict between vigorous economic growth and very limited improvements or reversals in the nutritional status and health of the majority of the population suggests that the modernization of the nineteenth century was a mixed blessing for those who lived through it. However, the industrial and scientific achievements of the nineteenth century were a precondition for the remarkable achievements of the twentieth century, including the unprecedented improvements in the conditions of life experienced by ordinary people.

Notes.


17. On sleeping vs. nonsleeping BMR, see Bender and Bender 1997;Garrow, James, and Ralph 2000.
18. Bellagio Conference 1983.
19. Quenouille et al. 1951; FAO/WHO/UNU 1985.
20. This table differs somewhat from table 5 in Fogel 1997 because of refinements in the estimates that underlie it.
21. 7,731 ÷ 17,768 ≈ 0.44.
22. Wrigley 1987.
23. Wrigley 1987; Lindert and Williamson 1982; Fogel, Floud, and Harris, n.d.
24. 105 ÷ 210 ≈ 0.50.
25. What is involved here is a reduction in leisure-time activities or in domestic activities of individuals not counted in the labor force (e.g., children). notes to pages 16–20 129
26. Fogel, Floud, and Harris, n.d.
27. Fogel 1986; Costa and Steckel 1997.
28. Fogel 1993 and the sources in Table 1.4.
29. For a further discussion of the disconnect between economic and biomedical measures of the standard of living, see Chapter 2, especially the discussion of the downward adjustments in wage rates needed to correct for economically-induced increases in morbidity and mortality. In this connection, Tanner has pointed out that if children are stunted without having their growth tempo slowed down, it is likely that the stunting is due to insults in fetal life and may be related to the pathology of the placenta. Severe undernutrition or poisoning in early infancy can also lead to permanent stunting (Tanner 1982).

By Robert William Fogel as 'The Dimensions of Misery during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries' in the book 'The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100',Cambridge University Press, London-New York, 2004. p.8-19. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Robert William Fogel won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1993. He is the Charles R.Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the Graduate School of Business and Director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago. His numerous publications include Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (with Stanley L. Engerman) and The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism.