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, the
extent to which Brazil’s early economic growth fostered improvements in
health remains unclear. This paper fills this void in scholarship by relying
on hitherto untapped archival sources with data on human stature—a reliable metric for health and nutritional status. My analysis centres heavily
on a large (n ≈ 16,000), geographically-comprehensive series compiled
from military inscription files, supplemented by an ancillary dataset
drawn from passport records (n ≈ 6,000). I document inferior heights in
the North and Northeast that predated the advent of industrialisation. At
the national level, my findings reveal an increase in stature of over 2.5 cm
between soldiers born in the 1880s and those born in the 1910s. In the
South and Southeast, I argue that increased real income and public-health
interventions explain the earlier upward trend in heights, while rural sanitary reforms were most important in the North and Northeast, where
heights remained stagnant until the 1910 decade and diseases such as hookworm and malaria were most rampant