Does adult stature capture conditions at birth or at some other stage in the growth cycle? Anthropometrics is lauded as a method for capturing net nutritional status over all the growing years. However, it is frequently assumed that conditions at birth were most influential. Was this true for historical populations? This article examines the heights of Flemish men born between 1800 and 1876 to tease apart which moments of growth were most sensitive to disruption and reflected in final heights. It exploits two proximate crises in 1846–9 and 1853–6 as shocks that permit age effects to be revealed. These are affirmed through a study of food prices and death rates. Both approaches suggest a shift of the critical moment away from the first few years of life and towards the adolescent growth spurt as the most influential on terminal stature. Furthermore, just as height is accumulated over the growing years, conditions influencing growth need to be understood cumulatively. Economic conditions at the time of birth were not explanatory, but their collective effects from ages 11 to 18 years were strongly influential. At these ages, both health and nutrition mattered, to varying degrees. Teenagers, rather than toddlers, should be our guides to the past.

The evolution of the average stature of convicts between 1830 and 1870 in the prisons of Ghent and Bruges is used as a measure of the biological standard of living and suggests progress in the quality of life in the Flemish countryside, particularly for children born after 1850. Heights are used to shed light on regional variations. Prisoners born in coastal Flanders were on average shorter than inmates born in inland Flanders. Heights furthermore provide a key to discovering specific socio-economic differences that can explain such variations, showing that wage labourers in coastal Flanders and textile workers in inland Flanders were the shortest occupational groups, especially before 1850. As such, heights provide a nuanced picture of living standards in rural Flanders during the nineteenth century.

Abstract The “panoptic” powers characteristic of nineteenth-century criminal justice systems created prison sources that are increasingly used to study past populations. Each step of the criminal process has its own selection logic, leading to a predominance of unskilled and low-skilled men and women in prison samples. There are also crucial differences between the profiles of single and repeat offenders. This article employs a sample of more than 27,000 individual admissions to Belgian prisons in the nineteenth century to explore these trends in greater depth. Recidivists form a specific subset of the prison population. Detailed comparisons of recidivists and nonrecidivists are therefore useful as they help to understand the selection mechanisms inherent in prison data. Male recidivists were predominately low-waged workers incarcerated for minor acts of violence or misconduct classified as disturbances of the peace. Female recidivists were disproportionately low-skilled workers arrested for beggary and sex work. Recidivists also differed in their stature. Male recidivists in Belgian prisons were shorter than the average prisoner. By contrast, female recidivists were taller than one-time offenders. These height differences have important implications for our understanding of well-being in the past.