The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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the records for Royal Marine recruits of Nelson’s navy, who were usually supplied by a pauper charity, the Marine Society. They write that:
The boys of the Marine Society were extraordinarily short, particularly in the 18th century. Thirteen-year-olds born in 1753-80 average 51.4 in (130.6cm), a full 10 inches (25.4cm) less than the children of London measured by Tanner and others in the 1960s. The full contrast, in both the 18th and the early 19th centuries, is brought out vividly by [plotting] two birth cohorts against the modern British standard growth chart; if a Marine Society boy of 1787 were miraculously transported into a doctor’s surgery in 1987, his next step would be into hospital as a sufferer from undernutrition or child abuse.36
They also describe the ‘the dip [in stature] for those recruited during the “Great Immiseration” of the turn of the 19th century, the rise after the Treaty of Vienna, and the dip for those recruited after the mid-1840s’ – giving the lie to the traditional idea that the transition to industrialism was a wonderful thing for Britain’s poor. It is hard to argue with skeletons.
From the mid-19th century onwards we find increasing rumblings of concern about the physiques of recruits in armed forces in Europe, and alarm in Britain in the 1890s at the state of the young but toothless British recruits who were expected to fight well-built Boer farmers in South Africa. A recent history of Britain says that, by 1914, the average British soldier was five inches (12.7 cm) shorter than his officer.37
Only in the last generation or two have typical Europeans regained some of their earlier stature and health, but very patchily. Danny Dorling and his colleagues found differences in stature and dental health almost identical to the Bronze Age ones given above, in Sheffield in 2009 – between the poorer district of Brightside, and the neighboring, wealthier one of Hallam (and this is in one of Britain’s less unequal cities).38
European Americans regained their lost stature in the 18th century, thanks to the treasure trove of high-yielding food plants developed over centuries by the American peoples – squashes, potatoes and especially maize39 – but in Europe itself the recovery had to wait for the arrival of the technology that made the great wars of the 20th century possible: the Haber process for fixing nitrates (first as fertilizers, then as explosives). Larry Lohman and Nicholas Hildyard have written that ‘the coal-intensive Bosch-Haber fertilizer-manufacturing process that tripled crop yields during the 20th century now accounts for half the nitrogen in every human body’.40
It is as if, having run through the possibilities of exploiting other lands, science and technology have given the world’s powerful, unequal societies the keys to the planetary past as well, so that it too can be plundered via the exploitation of fossil fuels, whereby 400 years’ worth of accumulated, ancient plant growth can be burned every year.41
TODAY’S INEQUALITY WILL DAMAGE FUTURE GENERATIONS
We are now learning that inequality doesn’t only affect the generation that experiences it; it also affects their children and grandchildren, even after life has improved.
The first glimmerings of this sobering fact came in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when the geneticist Raissa Berg and her colleagues carried out a statistical analysis of birth defects over previous decades. The more data they accumulated, from hospitals, from mortuary records and collective-farm ledgers, the clearer was the evidence that the Soviet people had suffered two terrible shocks during the 20th century, resulting in two ‘spikes’ in the numbers of birth defects.
The first of these spikes covered the late 1930s and early 1940s. Berg realized that the mothers of these children had all been born during the last, harsh year of the First World War and the famines that accompanied the revolution, counter-revolution and Wars of Intervention, and in the same areas of the Soviet Union that had suffered most. The second spike had occurred in the late 1950s: too early to be explained by the suffering in the Second World War (which did not hit the USSR till 1941) and rooted instead in 1936-38, the years of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’.
The mothers of both generations of damaged children had developed in their own mothers’ wombs under fearful conditions, sharing the terror and privation as they developed and their own ovaries formed, complete with the egg-cells from which their own damaged babies would grow. The two ‘spikes’ of birth defects pointed straight at these huge events, the second of which had otherwise been erased from history.
Similar stories are now emerging in the capitalist countries. The suffering inflicted on the people of northern Britain during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s was assumed to be over and done with, and eliminated completely by the welfare state. Wilkinson’s work and the Black Report began to shake that assumption. By the early 2000s – despite vast improvements since the 1940s in healthcare, nutrition, education, working and living conditions – mortality rates and levels of heart disease and diabetes in the north of England and in Scotland were still well above those of the south. David Barker and his colleagues at the University of Southampton have discovered that the anomalies result from genetic damage suffered by those who survived the Depression in the places where it was most severe.42
Other studies, done in the Netherlands (which suffered an intense famine in 1944-5 under Nazi blockade), in Scandinavia (parts of which suffered alternating famine years at the turn of the 20th century) and in China (among survivors of the famines that accompanied Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’) have revealed that the damage is carried down the generations by men, as well as by women.
Kent Thornburg has studied the effects in the southern US, where black and poor white populations still bear the genetic damage caused by the famines and violence that followed the Civil War of 1861-5 – damage reinforced by a further wave of hunger and societal collapse in the 1930s. Thornburg says that heart disease, stroke and diabetes are ‘still rampant’ in the Old South. ‘Their malnutrition goes back to the Civil War and it has never gotten back on track.’43 For the black population, it goes back even further; those waves of damage came on the back of the greatest trauma of them all, enslavement.
Inequality is a kind of violence – and in no way a metaphorical one. It carries the same level of human cost as any other kind of injury; it also has specific, human causes – actual individuals have argued, worked for, condoned and gone along with the policies that caused the injuries, and bear responsibility as with any other harmful act or failure to act. Ignorance of the facts could soon be no more a defence for politicians and civil servants, than ignorance of the fire regulations is for a factory boss. The debate is no longer ‘just’ about rights, but about negligence and abuse of power.
Could tolerating inequality become as unfashionable as smoking? Could it some day be viewed with the same automatic revulsion as tolerating wife beating, food adulteration or toxic pollution – all of which are in fact more common in more unequal societies than in more equal ones?44 In the past, politicians knew none of this, but today’s politicians can’t plead ignorance. How long before ‘austerity’ enthusiasts feel a social chill around them, or even face class actions in court?
1 See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, Penguin, 2009; Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality, Routledge, 2005.
2 C White et al,. Trends in life expectancy by social class 1972-2005. Health Statistics Quarterly, 36, 2007. Available at: nin.tl/lifeexpecttrends
3 Vicente Navarro, ‘Inequalities Are Unhealthy’; Monthly Review, vol 56, no 2, monthlyreview.org/0604navarro.htm
4 Andrew Gregory, ‘People born in parts of UK have lower life-expectancy than those in war-torn Lebanon’, Daily Mirror, 4 Nov 2015.
5 David Buck & David Maguire, Inequalities in life expectancy, King’s Fund, August 2015.
6 Wilkinson and Pickett, op cit, 2009.
7 ‘Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend’, The