John Komlos und J#246;rg Baten Looking Backward and Looking.PDF

John Komlos und Jörg Baten: Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Anthropometric Research and the Development of Social Science History Munich Discussion Paper No. 2003-15 Department of Economics University of Munich Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Online at http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/59/ “Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Anthropometric Research and the Development of Social Science History” John Komlos Jörg Baten University of Munich University of Tübingen The contributions included in this issue celebrate the 22nd-year anniversary of the Fall, 1982 issue of Social Science History (vol. 6, no. 4) devoted to “Trends in Nutrition, Labor 1 Welfare, and Labor Productivity”. The guest editors then were Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and all but one of the eight contributions were dedicated to anthropometric history (Fogel and Engerman 1982; Fogel et al. 1982; Floud and Wachter 1982; Friedman 1982; Margo and Steckel 1982; Sokoloff and Villaflor 1982; Tanner 1982).2 The issue had a considerable impact on the fledgling field of “anthropometric history,” even if a few publications preceded it in other journals (Fogel et al. 1978; Steckel 1979; Trussell and Steckel 1978). 3 The editor of Social Science History at the time, James Q. Graham, hoped to expand the exploration of human heights and their economic and social correlates. He was one of the few journal editors convinced early on that such an agenda fit well into an interdisciplinary historical 4 perspective. The collection gave a sense of excitement to the field by demonstrating the applicability of evolving methods to a wide range of problems; showing the availability of data; indicating the growing number of researchers in the fi