Wirtschaftliche Entwickling, Sozialstruktur und biologischer Lebensstandard in München und dem südlichen Bayern im 19. Jahrhundert (review)

The growing body of literature on the "biological standard of living" has contributed to our understanding of well-being in societies of the past, when other indicators such as income are difficult to assess. Measures of average height or longevity can be compared relatively well over time in populations with constant distribution of genetic traits. Height, in particular, is affected by the balance of nutritional intake and claims by diseases and physical activity during youth. Schuster's book provides new anthropometric and mortality evidence for nineteenth-century southern Bavaria and complements Baten's earlier research.¹

Schuster's chosen path is to focus on a small area but to provide in-depth analysis. His main source of evidence are conscription records of about 20,000 young men born between 1813 and 1842, with information on height, disease, and socioeconomic background (occupation of the conscript and his parents, legitimacy of birth, and orphan status). He obtained a sample of conscripts from the three court districts that constituted Munich, the capital city of the then Kingdom of Bavaria, and collected data on all conscripts from four additional, rural districts: Miesbach, Reichenhall, Tölz, and Wasserburg. Since conscription was virtually universal (and did not depend on physical stature), the data are representative of the general population and not only the poorer strata seeking employment in an army. However, as is the case with many other anthropometric studies of historical populations, they provide no evidence about the height of women, whose trajectory of well-being could have deviated slightly from that of men if one of the genders had systematically received preferential treatment by parents.

Prior to engaging in statistical analysis, the book offers meticulous descriptions of the districts' economic diversification, agriculture, and demographical patterns, making extensive use of reports by contemporaries and historical statistics. From an international perspective, a common feature in this region was its high infant mortality rate, in both towns and the countryside; about 40 percent of infants died within the first year. A chapter is devoted to this topic, arguing on the basis of previous literature that low prevalence of breast feeding and inadequate feeding practices can be regarded as a main culprit.

When turning to the twenty-one-year-old conscripts, the picture is less bleak. The average height of about 168cm compares well with other European countries in the nineteenth century, and the decline in height over time is much less pronounced than in areas witnessing industrialization. But height differed significantly by district and socioeconomic provenance. In particular, farmers cultivating their own soil and people working in food-related trades were able to confer nutritional advantages to their sons. Schuster also uses the information on diseases from the conscription records to create several major disease categories. He shows that several types of chronic diseases were associated with a significant reduction in physical stature, even when controlling for other socioeconomic factors.

That Schuster was able to link records from local parish registers in Miesbach into the 1920s is probably the most remarkable part of his book. In a comparison of a conscript's last occupation before death and his parent's occupation at the time of conscription, he finds that taller men were more likely to experience upward intergenerational mobility, and they had a higher probability of being married. In the last part of the book, Schuster studies the mortality risk in this linked sub-sample, using stratified Kaplan-Meier plots, logit models, and Cox proportional- hazard models. On the basis of the statements on cause of death, or at least the symptoms—which often required translation into modern notions of diseases—Schuster even estimates competing risk-mortality models. Consistent with the demographical literature, marital status is found to be a strong predictor of mortality risk, even though the mechanism at work—protective effects of marriage versus...