Withering heights: did indentured servants shrink from an encounter with Malthus? A comment on Komlos

R ecently in this journal, Komlos estimated the height of English and Irish indentured servants and transported convicts born between 1710 and 1760 using evidence taken from advertisements for runaway servants placed in North American newspapers.2 He found 'that the nutritional status of Englishmen began to decline with the birth cohorts of the 1730s. . . . According to the regression estimates, the decline [in height] between the 1720s and the 1740s was between 0.5 and 0.6 inches.'3 He pointed out that this 'was synchronous with the acceleration in the English population expansion in the 1730s'.4 He concluded, 'even if we acknowledge these limitations of the evidence, it appears that the height of the lower segments of the English population was probably beginning to decline prior to the beginning of the industrial revolution, and contemporaneously with the acceleration in population growth. In other words, population growth had started once again to press on available food supplies.'5 Komlos's claim is important because it provides a pre-nineteenthcentury example in which anthropometric measures diverge from conventional economic measures of the standard of living, indicating a deterioration in well-being during the first half of the eighteenth century when