Anthropometric History of Brazil, 1850–1950:Insights from Military and Passport Records

f historical evidence. Although quantitative scholars have revealed the efficacy of the First Republic (1889–1930) in fomenting economic progress, theextent to which Brazil’s early economic growth fostered improvements inhealth remains unclear. This paper fills this void in scholarship by relyingon hitherto untapped archival sources with data on human stature—a reliable metric for health and nutritional status. My analysis centres heavilyon a large (n ≈ 16,000), geographically-comprehensive series compiledfrom military inscription files, supplemented by an ancillary datasetdrawn from passport records (n ≈ 6,000). I document inferior heights inthe North and Northeast that predated the advent of industrialisation. Atthe national level, my findings reveal an increase in stature of over 2.5 cmbetween soldiers born in the 1880s and those born in the 1910s. In theSouth and Southeast, I argue that increased real income and public-healthinterventions explain the earlier upward trend in heights, while rural sanitary reforms were most important in the North and Northeast, whereheights remained stagnant until the 1910 decade and diseases such as hookworm and malaria were most rampan