Anthropometric History: Revisiting what’s in it for Ireland

This research note updates Cormac Ó Gráda’s (1996) critical review of the literature on the connection between the stature of the Irish, on the one hand, and their health and living standards, on the other. We find most of the anthropometric datasets used in this literature pertain to Irish emigrants rather than those who stayed behind. We therefore argue prison registers are a more appropriate source of anthropometric information. But results derived from these registers need to be handled with caution as prisoners are a selected population. We uncover the various observable selection biases inherent in prison data, and track how they change across the second half of the nineteenth century. We find changes in selection into crime across time are more likely to have been due to institutional rather than economic factors.