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Neither So Low nor So Short: Wages and Heights in Bourbon Spanish America from an International Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2014

RAFAEL DOBADO-GONZÁLEZ  and
HÉCTOR GARCÍA-MONTERO
RAFAEL DOBADO-GONZÁLEZ
Affiliation:
Rafael Dobado-González is full professor in the Department of Economic History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Email: [email protected].
HÉCTOR GARCÍA-MONTERO
Affiliation:
Héctor García-Montero is a research fellow at the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management and Dondena Centre at Bocconi University, Milan. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper offers new quantitative evidence on living standards in Bourbon America through a pioneering study of both wages and heights. Wages were not low, nor were heights short, by the international standards of the period. The living standards of Spanish Americans thus compare favourably with those of other regions of the world, including Europe. As in many parts of the West, one can observe a trend towards the deterioration of real wages in Spanish America at the end of the period. Our findings suggest that the ‘Great Divergence’ in living standards between Spanish America and the developed Western countries might have taken place mainly after independence and that currently available GDP per capita estimates might be too low.

Spanish abstract

Este artículo ofrece nueva información cuantitativa sobre los niveles de vida en la América borbónica mediante el estudio de salarios y estaturas. Ni los salarios ni las estaturas eran bajas en términos comparativos internancinales, Europa incluida. Como en muchas partes del mundo occidental, los salarios reales tendieron a deteriorarse al final del período estudiado. Nuestros resultados sugieren que la ‘Gran Divergencia’ en niveles de vida entre los países occidentales desarrollados podría haber ocurrido principlamente después de la independencia y que los PIB per capita disponibles podrían estar infraestimados.

Portuguese abstract

Este artigo oferece novas evidencias quantitativas acerca dos níveis de qualidade de vida na América bourbônica a partir de um estudo pioneiro que abrange salários e estaturas. Pelos padrões internacionais da época, salários não eram baixos, tampouco as estaturas das pessoas. Os padrões de vida de hispano-americanos podem portanto ser comparados de maneira favorável a outras regiões do mundo, incluindo a Europa. Assim como em várias regiões do ocidente, pode-se observar uma tendência em direção à redução dos salários reais na América espanhola no final do período. Nossas conclusões sugerem que a ‘Grande Divergência’ nos padrões de vida entre a América espanhola e os países desenvolvidos ocidentais pode ter ocorrido principalmente após a independência e que as atuais estimativas de PIB per capita podem ser demasiado baixas.

Keywords

living standardswagesheightsBourbon Americaanthropometric historyniveles de vidasalariosestaturasAmérica borbónicahistoria antropométricapadrões de vidasaláriosestaturasAmérica bourbônicahistória antropométrica
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 291 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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4 The Global Price and Income History Group (GPIHG), and Peter Lindert and Leticia Arroyo in particular, have made easy access to a number of rich secondary sources possible through the GPIHG's website at http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/. By sharing his databases on the web page of the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Robert Allen has facilitated our work significantly. Amílcar Challú's generosity with his data also deserves to be acknowledged.

5 Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, ‘Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States’, NBER Working Paper no. h0066 (1994); ‘Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economics’, NBER Working Paper no. w9259 (2002); and ‘Colonialism, Inequality, and Long-Run Paths of Development’, NBER Working Paper no. w11057 (2005). Acemoğlu, Daron, Johnson, Simon and Robinson, James A., ‘Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117: 4 (2002), pp. 1231–94Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 1279; Engerman and Sokoloff, ‘Colonialism, Inequality’, p. 4.

7 Quotes are from Acemoğlu, Johnson and Robinson, ‘Reversal of Fortune’; and Engerman and Sokoloff, ‘Colonialism, Inequality’, respectively.

8 Lyman L. Johnson, ‘The Development of Slave and Free Labor Regimes in Late Colonial Buenos Aires, 1770–1815’, Latin American Studies Consortium of New England, Occasional Paper no. 9 (1997), p. 1.

9 Bakewell, Peter J., Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Mineros de la Montaña Roja: el trabajo de los indios en Potosí, 1545–1650 (Madrid: Alianza, 1989); and A History of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).

10 Socolow, Susan M. and Johnson, Lyman L., ‘Urbanization in Colonial Latin America’, Journal of Urban History, 8: 1 (1981), p. 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Bairoch, Paul, De Jéricho á Mexico: villes et économie dans l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 498Google Scholar, authors’ translation.

12 Monteiro, John M., ‘Labor System’, in Bulmer-Thomas, Víctor, Coatsworth, John H. and Cortés, Roberto (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 395–422Google Scholar.

13 Coatsworth, John H., ‘Political Economy and Economic Organization’, in Bulmer-Thomas, , Coatsworth, and Cortés, (eds.), Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, p. 265Google Scholar.

14 Keen, Benjamin and Haynes, Keith, A History of Latin America (8th edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008)Google Scholar.

15 Coatsworth, ‘Political Economy and Economic Organization’, p. 264.

16 Johnson, ‘The Development of Slave and Free Labor Regimes’, p. 2.

17 Monteiro, ‘Labor System’, p. 232. The number of encomiendas in most of Spanish America declined after 1575: Yeager, Timothy J., ‘Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America’, Journal of Economic History, 55: 4 (1995), pp. 842–59Google Scholar. By 1790 they had disappeared. The 1650s ‘marked the end of the great period of massive slave importations’ in New Spain and Peru, according to Klein, Herbert S., The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 26Google Scholar. Repartimientos in New Spain were abolished, with some exceptions, in 1631: Lira, Andrés and Muro, Luis, ‘El siglo de la integración’, in Villegas, Daniel Cosío (ed.), Historia general de México, vol. 1 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2002), p. 337Google Scholar. Mita was far from universal in Andean mining, according to Bakewell, A History of Latin America, p. 240.

18 Mitayos in Potosí were paid four reales de plata (more than 12 grams of silver) per working day: see Tandeter, Enrique, Coacción y mercado: la minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692–1826 (Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1992), p. 67Google Scholar. Daily wages for labourers allotted within the repartimiento system in New Spain were fixed at 1.5 reales de plata per day (4.65 grams of silver) in 1603–10 and at 2 reales (6.2 grams of silver) in 1629: Gibson, Los aztecas bajo el dominio español, p. 255. Most of the arable land in Mesoamerica and the Andes was owned by ‘indigenous peasants and their communities until long after independence’, according to Coatsworth, John H., ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 40: 3 (2008), p. 556Google Scholar.

19 Challú, Amílcar E., ‘Agricultural Crisis and Biological Well-Being in Mexico, 1730–1835’, Historia Agraria, 47 (2009), pp. 21–44Google Scholar; and ‘The Great Decline: Biological Well-Being and Living Standards in Mexico, 1730–1840’, in Salvatore et al., Living Standards in Latin American History, pp. 23–67; Grajales-Porras, Agustín and López-Alonso, Moramay, ‘Physical Stature of Men in Eighteenth-Century México: Evidence from Puebla’, Economics and Human Biology, 9: 3 (2011), pp. 265–71Google Scholar; Salvatore, Ricardo D. and Baten, Joerg, ‘A Most Difficult Case of Estimation: Argentinian Heights, 1770–1840’, in Komlos, John and Baten, Joerg (eds.), The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), pp. 90–6Google Scholar; Salvatore, Ricardo D., ‘Heights and Welfare in Late-Colonial and Post-Independence Argentina’, in Komlos, and Baten, (eds.), The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective, pp. 97–121Google Scholar; Joerg Baten, ‘Argentina's Early Anthropometric History, 1820–1860s’, unpubl. working paper, University of Tübingen, 2010.

20 ‘If real wages and heights may also be considered acceptable indicators of living standards and economic development, the picture of Bourbon Hispanic America becomes less pessimistic than the one usually assumed by most economists and economic historians’: Rafael Dobado-González and Héctor García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short! Wages and Heights in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Colonial Latin America’, paper presented at the mini-conference ‘A Comparative Approach to Inequality and Development: Latin America and Europe’, Instituto Figuerola de Historia Económica and Fundación Ramón Areces, Madrid, 2009, p. 8.

21 Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’, p. 1.

22 ‘The real wage estimates presented here suggest that living standards may have increased substantially, a change that is quite clear for Mexico … But the standards of living of free wage labourers in Potosi, of construction workers in 18th century Buenos Aires, and, to a much lesser extent, of Chilean miners in the same period, were also relatively high, and compared favourably with real wages of large parts of Western Europe. Real wages in Peru and Colombia, on the other hand, were not particularly high before the 1720s’: Arroyo Abad, Davies and van Zanden, ‘Between Conquest and Independence’, p. 160.

23 This comment refers to the estimates presented in Coatsworth, ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth’; Angus Maddison, ‘Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2006 AD’ (2009), available at www.ggdc.net/maddison/; and de la Escosura, Leandro Prados, ‘Lost Decades? Economic Performance in Post-Independence Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 41: 2 (2009), pp. 279–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 ‘On the other hand, calculating ratios of heights and real wages to GDP per capita estimates … for 1820 converts Hispanic America into a clear outlier within a wide sample of countries. This finding suggests that available estimations on Bourbon Hispanic America GDP per capita should be revised upwards.’ Dobado-González and García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short!’, p. 2.

25 ‘They strongly suggest GDP per capita has developed differently than estimated by Maddison … in his pioneering research, and that the starting level at the eve of the 19th century may have been higher than assumed so far’: Arroyo Abad, Davies and van Zanden, ‘Between Conquest and Independence’, p. 160.

26 de la Escosura, Leandro Prados, ‘Inequality and Poverty in Latin America: A Long-Run Exploration’, in Hatton, Timothy J., O'Rourke, Kevin H. and Taylor, Alan M. (eds.), The New Comparative Economic History: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 291–315Google Scholar; and ‘Lost Decades?’, pp. 279–307; Grafe, Regina and Irigoin, Alejandra, ‘The Spanish Empire and its Legacy: Fiscal Redistribution and Political Conflict in Colonial and Post-Colonial Latin America’, Journal of Global History, 1: 2 (2006), pp. 241–67Google Scholar; Irigoin, Alejandra, ‘Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Nation-State and Empire Building’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 88: 2 (2008), pp. 173–209Google Scholar; ‘Gresham on Horseback: The Monetary Roots of Spanish American Political Fragmentation in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 62: 3 (2009), pp. 551–75; Dobado-González and García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short!’ and ‘Colonial Origins of Inequality’; Dobado, Rafael and Marrero, Gustavo, ‘The Role of the Imperial State in the Mining-Led Growth of Bourbon Mexico's Economy’, Economic History Review, 64: 3 (2011), pp. 855–84Google Scholar.

27 Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’.

28 Ibid.

29 Menegus, Margarita and Tortolero, Alejandro, ‘Introducción’, in Menegus, and Tortolero, (eds.), Agricultura mexicana: crecimiento e innovaciones (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 1999), pp. 7–32Google Scholar.

30 Miño, Manuel, ‘El “cacao guayaquil” en Nueva España, siglo XVIII’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 25: 1 (2009), pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

31 Humboldt, Ensayo político, p. 288, authors’ translation.

32 Ibid., p. 292.

33 Regarding the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this objection is far from merely theoretical. Differences in the long-term rate of growth of food prices are enormous across countries in some cases. For example, while corn and meat prices grew at roughly the same pace in Mexico City, in Bogotá increases in the price of meat clearly exceeded those of corn and potatoes (see http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/).

34 In Allen, Robert C., Bassino, Jean P., Ma, Debin, Moll-Murata, Cristina and van Zanden, Jan Luiten, ‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925, in Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India’, Economic History Review, 64: S1 (2010), p. 17Google Scholar, Allen et al. recognise changes in the diet of Europeans when explaining the consumption basket used, describing it as ‘late medieval in inspiration, in that it does not contain new commodities like sugar and potatoes introduced into Europe after the voyages of discovery’. In fact, they compute two different baskets for both China (Suzhou/Canton and Beijing) and Europe (northern Europe and Milan).

35 In Bogotá and Potosí, wages seem not to have changed at all over the whole of the eighteenth century in nominal terms. In Mexico only minimal variation is perceptible. In terms of silver, the small decrease in nominal wages observed in the very long run is caused by several slight debasements of the real de a ocho. Similar instances may be found in Europe as well. Allen's database of wages for labourers exhibits long-term perfect immobility in Amsterdam (1755–1840) and Antwerp (1682–1815). Variation is also very small in London and southern England between 1735 and 1792, since only small temporary changes are registered: see www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php#europe.

36 Even in more developed markets for goods and factors, such as those of London and southern England, differences in volatility between the prices of wheat and labour are significant, their coefficients of inter-annual variation being 51.3 and 18.6 per cent, respectively, between 1700 and 1810: calculated using data from www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php#europe.

37 Allen, ‘Real Wages in Europe and Asia’, p. 122.

38 Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’.

39 See, respectively, Brown, Kendall W., ‘Price Movements in Eighteenth-Century Peru: Arequipa’, in Johnson, and Tandeter, (eds.), Essays on the Price History, pp. 173–200Google Scholar; Johnson, , ‘The Price History of Buenos Aires’; and Jorge Larraín, ‘Productos y precios: el caso chileno en los siglos XVII y XVIII’, in Johnson, Lyman L. and Tandeter, Enrique (eds.), Economías coloniales: precios y salarios en América Latina, siglo XVII (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), pp. 119–52Google Scholar.

40 Brown, ‘Price Movements’, estimates the cost of two baskets (‘Spanish’ and ‘mestizo’) for Arequipa. Bacon, mutton, sugar, potatoes and coca leaves are found among the main goods consumed by mestizo families. In Buenos Aires, meat, fish (fresh and dried) and yerba mate were important parts of the commoners’ diet: see Johnson, ‘The Price History of Buenos Aires’. The structure of expenditure in Santiago was also rather diverse, since fat, sugar, animal proteins (dried beef, mutton, fresh and dried fish and seafood), fruits and vegetables (potatoes) are included along with wheat and flour. Moreover the share of non-vegetarian items, excluding animal fat, was 27.1 per cent in 1754–8: see Larraín, ‘Productos y precios’, p. 122.

41 For the sake of academic rigour, contrary to what Arroyo et al. claim, the idea of Mexico City having surprisingly low meat prices does not belong to Dobado-González and García-Montero (inappropriately quoted as ‘Gonzalez’, incidentally, in ‘Between Conquest and Independence’, p. 29 n. 49). In fact, this interesting contribution should be attributed to Quiroz, Enriqueta, Entre el lujo y la subsistencia: mercado, abastecimiento y precios de la carne en la ciudad de México, 1750–1812 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2005)Google Scholar.

42 Allen et al., ‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China’, p. 7. Alcohol, essentially wine, amounted to 7 per cent of expenditure in mid-eighteenth-century Santiago: see Larraín, ‘Productos y precios’, p. 122. In Buenos Aires, wine and eau de vie were increasingly consumed in the late Bourbon period: see Johnson, ‘The Price History of Buenos Aires’, p. 166. Humboldt (Ensayo politico, p. 133) mentions the ‘enormous quantity’ of pulque consumed by Mexican inhabitants of varied ethnic origin when compared with total alcoholic beverages sold in Paris: ‘Indians, mestizos, mulatos and even most of the creole whites’. On the importance of pulque in Mexico City, see Vásquez, Miguel Ángel, ‘Las pulquerías en la vida diaria de los habitantes de la Ciudad de México’, in Gonzalbo, Pilar (ed.), Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 3: El siglo XVIII: entre tradición y cambio (Mexico City: El Colegio de México and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), pp. 71–95Google Scholar. Chicha was no less popular among the Andean population.

43 Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’, p. 43; and Arroyo Abad, Davies and van Zanden, ‘Between Conquest and Independence’, p. 45.

44 Tandeter, Coacción y mercado.

45 Silver obtained by this segment of the population (kajchas) was far from insignificant: more than one-third of total legally registered production (ibid., p. 124).

46 Ibid.

47 Brading, Mineros y comerciantes; Ladd, Génesis y desarrollo de una huelga.

48 Brading, Mineros y comerciantes, p. 201, author's translation.

49 Ladd, Génesis y desarrollo de una huelga; Keen and Haynes, A History of Latin America.

50 ‘There might be good economic reasons for the generalization of payments in kind frequently observed in underdeveloped – colonial or not – economies. In-kind wages can be more effective for increasing the supply of labour than wages in cash when food-security considerations are important for workers, such as in cases of poverty or thin food markets: see Takashi Kurosaki, ‘Wages in Kind and Economic Development: Historical and Contemporary Evidence from Asia’, PRIMCED Project, Discussion Paper Series no. 11, Hitotsubashi University, March 2011.

51 It is probable that Chilean grain wages were also high in comparative terms, as this captaincy-general was a net exporter of wheat. Moreover, flour prices in grams of silver were lower in Santiago than in Pennsylvania between 1720 and 1805: see http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Datafilelist.htm.

52 A period of abnormally high wheat prices commenced in 1803 as a result of intense drought and political and military turmoil: Johnson, ‘The Price History of Buenos Aires’, p. 182. The average price of wheat in 1803–6 was triple that of 1791–1802 (ibid., pp. 170–1).

53 Broadberry and Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence’, p. 3.

54 Even if the particular case of Buenos Aires is disregarded, prices of meat in Spanish America are at the bottom of the available sample (19 cases): beef was five to six times cheaper in markets in New Spain than in London and southern England, while in Massachusetts it was more than twice as expensive as in Bogotá.

55 Quiroz, ‘Entre el lujo y la subsistencia’, p. 43.

56 Annual per capita consumption of fresh red meat by New Yorkers grew from 132.3 pounds (about 60 kilos) in 1790 to 166.5 pounds (just over 75 kilos) between 1795 and 1816: Gergely Baics, ‘Appetite for Beef: How Much Meat Did Early New Yorkers Consume?’, Working Paper MWP 2010/15, European University Institute (2010), p. 7. Meat consumption in the Thirteen Colonies was slightly higher than in republican New York: ibid., p. 9.

57 Quiroz, ‘Entre el lujo y la subsistencia’, p. 65.

58 Ibid., p. 44. The representative basket of an average urban consumer in the Ottoman Empire includes 51.2 kilos of mutton per year: Özmucur, Süleyman and Pamuk, Şevket, ‘Real Wages and the Standards of Living in the Ottoman Empire, 1469–1914’, Journal of Economic History, 62: 2 (2002), p. 298Google Scholar. In their attempt to capture the ‘subsistence lifestyle’ in China (Suahou/Canton and Beijing) and Europe (northern Europe and Milan), only 3 kilos of meat/fish per male per year are computed. Exactly the same quantity of meat appears in the basket specified for the Americas in Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’.

59 Ladd, Génesis y desarrollo de una huelga, p. 34.

60 Quiroz, ‘Salarios y condiciones de vida’.

61 On Europe, see Bacci, Massimo Livi, The Population of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 49Google Scholar.

62 While the share of ‘sugar and sweets’ in the structure of expenditure estimated by Larraín (‘Productos y precios’) for Santiago in 1754–8 is 6.5 per cent, neither Özmucur and Pamuk (‘Real Wages and the Standards of Living’) nor Allen et al. (‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China’) include it in their representative baskets for the Ottoman Empire and China, Europe, Japan and India respectively. Sugar is also part of the basket specified for Arequipa's mestizo families by Brown (‘Price Movements’). Go and Lindert consider sugar in their comparison of real wages between nineteenth-century Massachusetts and West Virginia and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Massachusetts and England, available at http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Datafilelist.htm#NorthAmerica.

63 Jonathan Hersh and Hans J. Voth, ‘Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Rise of European Living Standards after 1492’, Discussion Paper no. DP7386, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2009.

64 According to Allen (‘The Great Divergence’), London and southern England and Milan may, respectively, represent the top and bottom of the range of real wages and living standards within European countries of intermediate to high level of economic development during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The three Spanish American cities were different in relevant respects (size, location, political and economic functions). Mexico City was the largest in the Americas until the nineteenth century and the capital of the principal Spanish viceroyalty. Bogotá had a much smaller population (roughly one-tenth of Mexico City) and a relatively simple economic life. Potosí, an important Andean mining centre, is generally assumed to be the epitome of the Spanish colonial exploitation in America.

65 With respect to Mexico, since nominal wages of building labourers remained practically constant throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, missing observations in those years for which data on corn and meat prices are available have been replaced by the value of the previous year. Thus we assume that nominal wages after 1719 (8.5 grams of silver) did not change until 1732 (9.3 grams of silver), or between 1738 (9.3 grams) and 1752 (9.3 grams).

66 See Go and Lindert, http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/Datafilelist.htm#NorthAmerica; and Adams, Donald R., ‘Prices and Wages in Maryland, 1750–1850’, Journal of Economic History, 46: 3 (1986), pp. 625–45Google Scholar.

67 Broadberry and Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence’, and Allen et al., ‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China’.

68 Filiaciones are individual identification documents that include personal and other information (service term, payments, unit, place of recruiting and active service seen). Most of our data for northern New Spain come from this source. Muster rolls, a list reporting heights and, occasionally, other personal and professional information for every militiaman are the source of data for south-eastern New Spain and Venezuela.

69 We know that all filiaciones belong to people born in Spanish America because that information is included in the source. As for muster rolls, in some cases (the Milicia de Blancos de Maracaibo and the Batallón de Infantería de Castilla de Yucatán) the source also shows a final summary with the origin of all individuals listed. It can be seen that nearly 100 per cent were born in the place to which the militia belonged. According to Pérez, María del Carmen Gómez, El sistema defensivo americano, siglo XVIII (Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE América, 1992), p. 61Google Scholar, more than 90 per cent of militiamen were Spanish Americans rather than Spaniards.

70 The metric system was based on the Paris foot or pied du roi: 1 foot=32.5 cm, 1 inch=2.71 cm. See Hueso, Antonio D. Cámara, ‘Fuentes antropométricas en España: problemas metodológicos para los siglos XVIII y XIX’, Historia Agraria, 38: 1 (2006), pp. 105–18Google Scholar; and Challú, Amílcar, ‘Agricultural Crisis and Biological Well-Being in Mexico, 1730–1835’, Historia Agraria, 47: 1 (2009), p. 24Google Scholar.

71 Steckel, Richard H. and Rose, Jerome C., ‘A Health Index from Skeletal Remains’, in Steckel, and Rose, (eds.), The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 61–93Google Scholar.

72 Challú, ‘Agricultural Crisis’ and ‘The Great Decline’.

73 See Joerg Baten, Mojgan Stejl and Pierre van der Eng, ‘Long-Term Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Indonesia’, Working Paper in Economics and Econometrics no. 514, Australian National University (February 2010); Carles Boix and Frances M. Rosenbluth, ‘Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2004, available at www.princeton.edu/~cboix/bones.pdf.

74 For Limousin, Orléans, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Russia and Spain, see Heyberger, Laurent, La révolution des corps: décroissance et croissance structurale des habitants des villes et des campagnes en France, 1780–1940 (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2005)Google Scholar; Schubert, Hermann and Koch, Daniel, ‘Anthropometric History of the French Revolution in the Province of Orleans’, Economics and Human Biology, 9: 3 (2011), pp. 277–83Google Scholar; Komlos, John, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A'Hearn, Brian, Peracchi, Franco and Vecchi, Giovanni, ‘Height and the Normal Distribution: Evidence from Italian Military Data’, Demography, 46: 1 (2009), pp. 1–25Google Scholar; Breschi, Marco and Pozzi, Lucia (eds.), Salute, malattia e sopravvivenza in Italia fra ‘800 e ‘900 (Udine: Forum, 2007)Google Scholar; Joerg Baten, Jaime Reis and Ivonne Stolz, ‘The Biological Standard of Living in Portugal, 1720–1980: When and Why Did the Portuguese Become the Shortest in Europe?’, paper presented at XVth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009; Mironov, Boris, ‘The Burden of Grandeur: Physical and Economic Well-Being of the Russian Population in the Eighteenth Century’, in Allen, Robert C., Bengtsson, Tommy and Dribe, Martin (eds.), Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 255–77Google Scholar; Héctor García-Montero, ‘El nivel de vida biológico de los españoles a finales del Antiguo Régimen’, paper presented at II Encuentro Anual de la Asociacón Española de Historia Económica, Madrid, 2010.

75 Ríos, Luis, ‘Guatemala: una revisión de las fuentes antropométricas disponibles’, Historia Agraria, 47 (2009), pp. 227–30Google Scholar, 233–4. Some factors point to a possible downward bias in our estimation of height for south-eastern New Spain. Militiaman height is closer to the European standards in the only case in which the original data do not present a serious problem of ‘heaping’ in the minimum height requirement (the Batallón de Infantería de Castilla, formed by blancos from Yucatán). Moreover, officers’ height was never recorded, and this is largely true also for sub-officers. Additionally, most skilled workers were excluded from conscription. The modal value of the height distribution, if ‘heaping’ is omitted, is roughly 61 French inches (approximately 165 cm). Thus, our estimate might rather be considered the lower bound of heights in south-eastern New Spain. Some of these remarks also apply for the remainder of the New Spain samples.

76 Steckel, ‘A Health Index from Skeletal Remains’.

77 Salvatore and Baten, ‘A Most Difficult Case of Estimation’; Salvatore, ‘Heights and Welfare’; Baten, Joerg and Carson, Scott, ‘Latin American Anthropometrics, Past and Present: An Overview’, Economics and Human Biology, 8: 2 (2010), p. 142CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedn. 1.

78 See Salvatore, Ricardo D., ‘Heights, Nutrition and Well-Being in Argentina, ca. 1850–1950: Preliminary Results’, Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 25: 1 (2007), pp. 53–86Google Scholar; Baten, Joerg, Pelger, Ines and Twrdek, Linda, ‘The Anthropometric History of Argentina, Brazil and Peru during the 19th and Early 20th Century’, Economics and Human Biology, 7: 3 (2009), pp. 319–33Google Scholar; Baten, ‘Argentina's Early Anthropometric History, 1820–1860s’.

79 Baten, Pelger and Twrdek, ‘The Anthropometric History’; Twrdek, Linda and Manzel, Kerstin, ‘The Seed of Abundance and Misery: Peruvian Living Standards from the Early Republican Period to the End of the Guano Era’, Economics and Human Biology, 8: 2 (2008), pp. 145–52Google Scholar.

80 On England, see Komlos, John, ‘On English Pygmies and Giants: The Physical Stature of English Youth in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries’, Research in Economic History, 25 (2007), pp. 149–68Google Scholar. On the United States, see Margo, Robert and Steckel, Richard H., ‘Heights of Native-Born Whites during the Antebellum Period’, Journal of Economic History, 43: 1 (1983), pp. 167–74Google Scholar; and Steckel, Richard H., ‘A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity’, Journal of Economic History, 46: 3 (1986), pp. 721–41Google Scholar. On Brazil and Peru, see Baten, Pelger and Twrdek, ‘The Anthropometric History’; and Twrdek and Manzel, ‘The Seed of Abundance and Misery’.

81 Steckel and Rose (eds.), The Backbone of History.

82 Maddison, Angus, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001)Google Scholar; Coatsworth, ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth’; Prados de la Escosura, ‘Lost Decades?’.

83 Results obtained by Grajales-Porras and López-Alonso for two villages of the intendancy of Puebla fit well within this picture: see Grajales-Porras and López-Alonso, ‘Physical Stature of Men’, p. 269.

84 Challú, ‘Agricultural Crisis’ and ‘The Great Decline’.

85 Komlos, John and Baten, Joerg, ‘Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Anthropometric Research and the Development of Social Science History’, Social Science History, 28: 2 (2004), pp. 191–210Google Scholar; Komlos, John and Küchenhoff, Helmut, ‘The Diminution of the Physical Stature of the English Male Population in the Eighteenth Century’, Cliometrica, 6: 1 (2012), pp. 45–62Google Scholar.

86 Challú, ‘The Great Decline’, p. 53.

87 Komlos and Küchenhoff, ‘The Diminution of the Physical Stature’, p. 55. See also Martínez-Carrion, José-Miguel, ‘La talla de los europeos, 1700–2000: ciclos, crecimiento y desigualdad’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica/Economic History Research, 8: 3 (2012), pp. 176–87Google Scholar.

88 Bogin, Barry and Keep, Ryan, ‘Eight Thousand Years of Economic and Political History in Latin America Revealed by Anthropometry’, Annals of Human Biology, 26: 4 (1998), pp. 333–51Google Scholar; Márquez, Lourdes and del Ángel, Andrés, ‘Height among Prehispanic Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula: Reconsideration’, in Whittington, Stephen M. and Reed, David L. (eds.), Bones of the Maya: Studies of Ancient Skeletons (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997), pp. 62–77Google Scholar; Márquez, Lourdes, McCaa, Robert, Storey, Rebecca and del Ángel, Andrés, ‘Health and Nutrition in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica’, in Steckel, and Rose, (eds.), The Backbone of History, pp. 307–40Google Scholar; Storey, Rebecca, Márquez, Lourdes and Smith, Vernon, ‘A Study of Health and Economy of the Last Thousand Years’, in Steckel, and Rose, (eds.), The Backbone of History, pp. 283–306Google Scholar.

89 Márquez et al., ‘Health and Nutrition in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica’, p. 320. Mesoamerica might have not been exceptional. In Europe, a fall in the average physical stature at least since the sixth century is perceptible: see Koepke, Nikola and Baten, Joerg, ‘The Biological Standard of Living in Europe during the Last Two Millennia’, European Review of Economic History, 9: 1 (2005), pp. 61–95Google Scholar. The decrease in height appears to have been widespread across European regions and especially large (almost 7 cm) in the best-documented case, that of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century: see Steckel, Richard H., ‘New Light on the “Dark Ages’”: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era’, Social Science History, 28: 2 (2004), p. 216Google Scholar. A similar pattern arises for Japan, according to Hiramoto, Yoshisuke, ‘Secular Changes in Japan since Prehistory’, Journal of Anthropology Society of Nippon, 80 (1972), pp. 221–36Google Scholar.

90 Coatsworth, ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth’.

91 Knight, Alan, Mexico: From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Semo, Enrique, ‘Los orígenes: de los cazadores y recolectores a las sociedades tributarias’, in Semo, (ed.), Historia económica de México, vol. 1 (Mexico City: UNAM-Océano, 2006)Google Scholar.

92 Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘History without Evidence: Latin America Inequality since 1491’, paper presented at the mini-conference ‘A Comparative Approach to Inequality and Development: Latin America and Europe’, Madrid, 8–9 May 2009, p. 20.

93 ‘This article and other work in anthropometric history suggest that the poor nutrition of many native populations, including those rapidly conquered, has been overlooked’: Steckel, Richard H., ‘Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America: The Skeletal Evidence’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36: 1 (2005), p. 29Google Scholar.

94 Acemoğlu, Johnson and Robinson, ‘Reversal of Fortune’.

95 Prados de la Escosura, ‘Inequality and Poverty’ and ‘Lost Decades’; Grafe and Irigoin, ‘The Spanish Empire and Its Legacy’; Irigoin, Alejandra, ‘Las raíces monetarias de la fragmentación política de la América española en el siglo XIX’, Historia Mexicana, 59: 3 (2010), pp. 919–79Google Scholar; ‘Bargaining for Absolutism’; and ‘Gresham on Horseback’; Dobado-González and García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short!’ and ‘Colonial Origins of Inequality’; Dobado and Marrero, ‘The Role of the Imperial State’.

96 Allen, Murphy and Schneider, ‘The Colonial Origins of the Divergence’.

97 Dobado-González and García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short!’ and ‘Colonial Origins of Inequality’.

98 Coatsworth, ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth’; Maddison, ‘Statistics on World Population’.

99 Coatsworth, ‘Political Economy and Economic Organization’ and ‘Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth’; Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Five Centuries of Latin American Inequality’, NBER Working Paper no. 15305 (2009); Dobado-González and García-Montero, ‘Neither So Low nor So Short!’ and ‘Colonial Origins of Inequality’; Engerman and Sokoloff, ‘Factor Endowments, Institutions’, ‘Factor Endowments, Inequality’ and ‘Colonialism, Inequality’.

100 More details on the labour conditions of miners in New Spain can be found in Dobado and Marrero, ‘The Role of the Imperial State’.