Roderick Floud

Poverty and Physical Stature: Evidence on the Standard of Living of London Boys 1770–1870

To many historians, and to most of their students, the question of the impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the poor of Britain has become confused, an arcane debate of ever greater statistical complexity. This is a pity, for “the most sustained single controversy in British economic history” still has, and should have, the capacity to excite and rouse the imagination, as it did for those who began, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Condition of England debate (Mathias, 1975: vii; Taylor, 1975: xi). For Friedrich Engels, Edwin Chadwick, John Stuart Mill, or Lord Shaftesbury, and for many who as government inspectors or members of local statistical societies provided the evidence, the condition of the working classes was something tangible, to be seen in the streets of Manchester or London, demonstrated in the faces and bodies of the artisans and laborers who walked those streets and worked in the workshops and factories. The moral outrage felt by Engels, Chadwick, Shaftesbury, Barnardo, and many others in the nineteenth century came from the sight not only of squalid living conditions but of the malnourished bodies of the poor themselves.

Quantitative History and People’s History: Two Methods in Conflict?

It was fashionable some years ago for historians to speak of the quantitative revolution in their subject and to look forward, either with hope or with foreboding, to the day when history, like geography, sociology, and other social sciences before it, would be dominated by practitioners skilled in quantitative methods. New questions would be asked, new methods used, new sources exploited, and new discoveries made. In the process, those historians without training in quantitative methods would be swept from the battlegrounds of the subject. They would be forced to retreat either into the antiquarianism within which many quantitative historians, privately, located them or they would be forced to undergo a painful process of retooling in a struggle to avoid technological obsolescence. It was a reasonable expectation in those days that a statistical training would become as essential to a historian as a training in foreign languages or experience in burrowing for sources in the record office: As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie put it in 1968, by the 1980s “the historian will be a programmer or he will be nothing” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1968). As a result, quantitative historians gathering in the early 1970s thought that the quantitative revolution would be largely complete as the world entered the 1980s.

Quantitative history: Evolution of methods and techniques∗

(1977). Quantitative history: Evolution of methods and techniques. Journal of the Society of Archivists: Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 407-417.

The Origins of Anthropometric History

I knew nothing of anthropometry—not even the meaning of the word—when, in 1977, Robert Fogel invited me to give a seminar at Harvard. Over lunch after quite a grueling occasion, he asked me if I would be interested in taking part in a project to investigate the long-term decline in mortality in the United States. As he pointed out, the vast majority of migrants to the American colonies and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from Great Britain and Ireland; it was important, in explaining their subsequent mortality experience, to be able to assess their state of health before they arrived in North America. Their heights and those of the British population as a whole might, he suggested, provide evidence for such an assessment. I was flattered to be asked to work with one of the leaders of the economic history profession, intrigued by the project—if initially skeptical about the use of height data—and, by the end of a long lunch, enthusiastic about working with Fogel and his collaborator, Stan Engerman, whom I had known for some years.