In this essay, I review Robert Fogel's The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 which is concerned with the past, present, and future of human health. Fogel's work places great emphasis on nutrition, not only for the history of health, but for explaining aspects of current health,...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...