The heights of French-Canadian convicts, 1780s-1820s

•French-Canadians are short by North American standards as early as the 1780s.•French-Canadians grew shorter from the 1790s to 1820s.•French-Canadians are taller than Frenchmen and most inhabitants of Latin America (save Argentinians), equally tall as the British.•French-Canadians are shorter than all the Americans (white or black).

This paper uses a novel dataset of heights collected from the records of the Quebec City prison between 1813 and 1847 to survey the French-Canadian population of Quebec-which was then known either as Lower Canada or Canada East. Using a birth-cohort approach with 10 year birth cohorts from the 1780s to the 1820s, we find that French-Canadian prisoners grew shorter over the period. Through the whole sample period, they were short compared to Americans. However, French-Canadians were taller either than their cousins in France or the inhabitants of Latin America (except Argentinians). In addition to extending anthropometric data in Canada to the 1780s, we are able to extend comparisons between the Old and New Worlds as well as comparisons between North America and Latin America. We highlight the key structural economic changes and shocks and discuss their possible impact on the anthropometric data.