6 - The American experience of technophysio evolution

Summary

In the preceding chapters, we have explored how the health indicators of British and European populations – stature, mortality, and morbidity – have evolved over the past three centuries. That evolution was a process of adapting to the long-term changes in social, environmental, and nutritional factors that have been substantially influenced by technological progress in various fields. One lesson from the preceding chapters is that the experience of technophysio evolution varied across countries, mainly depending on country-specific trends of diet and environment. During the course of the past three centuries, America shared the experiences of urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural progress with Britain and European countries, but there existed differences as well as similarities. America uniquely observed dynamic demographic, social, and economic features such as mass migration from Europe, slavery, the opening up of unexploited land, overcoming the variety of disease environments, and so on. America also developed institutions and technologies that are peculiar to those unique experiences. Thus, the study of American experiences and its comparison with British and European experiences deepens our understanding of technophysio evolution.

Since the eighteenth century, changes in human development in Europe have been tied, to a large extent, to the acceleration of economic change. As we have already seen, economic historians now believe that the pace of economic change during the eighteenth century was somewhat slower than an earlier generation of historians may have supposed but the cumulative effect of the changes which did occur was nevertheless dramatic.