This paper investigates the proposition made by contemporaries that women and children disproportionately bore the brunt of industrialisation and urbanisation by examining how poor working-class families in mid-Victorian London shared their resources. Allocation is inferred from independently...

This article examines three propositions put by Leunig and Voth: that smallpox reduced stature irrespective of location, that stunting was most apparent among adolescents, and that these relationships were obscured in my earlier work by small sample size. It tests these claims by re-examining...

In 2009, Horrell, Meredith and Oxley used trends in body mass to argue that poor London women in the later 19th century suffered declining access to household resources over their lifetimes.  The authors evaluated competing models of household behaviour, rejected the unitary model of equal...

The place of penal transportation in Australia's economic history has always been controversial. Convict workers were frequently denigrated as worse than useless, yet without convicts the settlements would have lacked sufficient labour for development. In Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s, convicts...

Did the male breadwinner get more household resources, and if so, why? A dearth of direct information on intra-household processes makes it hard to answer. Instead reliance has to be placed on indirect evidence. Here, we investigate these processes more rigorously. We start by outlining...