Introduction to special section on the biological standard of living

In December 2008 the WOG Historical Demography organised a workshop at Ghent University that covered a wide range of topics from fertility trends and kinship characteristics to health issues. The presentations and discussions that took place at the workshop provided the inspiration for this special section on the biological standard of living. The articles in this section offer valuable contributions for three of those biological measures: height, mortality and cause of death. The introduction to the section demonstrates the significance of this particular kind of evidence for our understanding of social and economic history. Exploring and analysing the well-being of populations is one of the most interesting and main challenges of social scientists. As the articles in this special section show, using historical evidence on the health and height of a population is extremely important for our understanding of certain socio-economic processes, but also extremely complex.