Cian O'Donovan

CODonovan
Member since Mar 31st, 2022

An Investigation into Military and Civilian Heights at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Created 2 years ago

Intro

In examining the Height differentials between different militaries and their cadets, we are interested in seeing the variations by which different militaries accept candidates for their programs and forces as well as to see the different characteristics of each military and compare these with the intent of looking at how their specific heights factor into a debate on the welfare of the country itself and whether it is respective of a population at large.

In terms of a research question, what we are interested in looking at is ‘Where are height differentials most divergent and how are these differentials expressed in military and civilian populations across the world?’. Hopefully by examining the data, we can see diversity in the similarities and differences of populations across the world in the time period we have picked also. In terms of relevance, the period of the 19th century is an important part of rising welfare levels across the world and the hope is that we can see this made manifest in the data. As we will subsequently refer to, height and welfare levels are positively correlated, so examining these elements will let us draw a conclusion based on where and how these peoples heights were increasing.

The sources themselves are varied and diverse in examining these differential populations. To spare the reader from a cacophony of noisy data and to separate a signal from this noise, we have elected to look at institutionalised data especially, rather than census or voluntary data. The reasoning being that the datasets for these institutional populations will be far more evident and clear than a mess of data in the 19th century with questionable relevance. Prison populations, conscripts, and military applicants have been examined.

North America and Europe

The variance in height of various military applicants and personnel across Europe and in the United States of America has been studied by scholars extensively. (Komlos, ;Baten, 1999;Baten & Fertig; Stolz, Baten & Reis, 2013) Most of these studies look at one country and a single dataset. In this data story, we aim to combine several datasets which reside within the microHeights-dataset. Interesting to note here is the difference between the continents when looking at height. In the graph below, information for the US, Germany and Portugal is combined to look at the average height of their military personnel during the nineteenth century. US applicants to the West Point Academy are the tallest. This has likely to do with height requirements for applicants there. Conscripts in Portugal are at least 6 centimetres, on average, smaller than these US soldiers. Germany hangs in between, being at least 2 centimetres smaller than their US counterparts but 4 centimetres higher than the Portuguese. The Portuguese are known in Europe as one of the smallest people, Stolz, Baten and Reis examined this extensively and come to the conclusion that this had to do with a delay in human-capital formation.