Health, Height, and Historical Development: The Case of South Africa, 1850–1900

This paper analyses the evolution of adult stature to discover how economic growth and social inequalities influenced health in South Africa.  It breaks new ground in three ways. Firstly, it analyses a newly transcribed quantitative dataset.  Secondly, it does so using data on prisoners rather than military recruitment, the source from which anthropometric evidence has so far been drawn for the South Africa context. This archival source – prison records – contains demographic and socioeconomic data from over 12,000 men locally born in South Africa as well as men descended from European races.  Finally, there is limited anthropometric evidence for all of South Africa’s racial populations born before 1900. What evidence has been used so far has focused on selected racial groups (Inwood and Masakure, 2013). This paper thus contributes analysis of three South African “racial” groups, Coloured, White and African, and does so from an earlier period - 1850 to 1900.