Birth, Death, and Religious Faith in a Dissenting Community: A Microhistory of Nailsworth and Hinterland, 1695–1837 by Albion M. Urdank (review)

Urdank’s book addresses several questions that have interested historical demographers of Britain but that are notoriously difficult to answer: Did the demographic lives, and especially the birth rates, of British Nonconformists (who dissented from the established Anglican Church) differ significantly from those of the religious majority? What was the relationship of religious affiliations and identities to the economic and demographic changes in Britain during the Industrial Revolution? Whereas previous studies of Nonconformists’ demographic experience centered on groups such as the Quakers, who were pioneers in family limitation, Urdank’s new work studies a set of Baptist communities of Gloucestershire during the “long eighteenth century.”

The book’s chapters appear to be separate analytical experiments. The author vaunts his use of narrative and quantitative approaches, which include a “textual” analysis of individual parish-register records and a variety of multivariate methods. The “narrative” sections reconstruct the reproductive careers of a small number of couples and offer ad hoc speculations on why these careers proceeded as they did. The quantitative portions include approaches such as discrete-time event history and path analysis. Urdank summarizes main findings at the end of each chapter and in the conclusion of the study, but sorting out their significance or robustness is by no means easy. Some results suggest a positive relationship between evangelical religious conversion and fertility, but the impacts are often small and the results unstable across different samples, analytical designs, and genders.

Urdank has made it challenging for readers to accept his findings with much confidence. He neglects one of the most important traditions of historical demography—the systematic critique of sources. He dispenses information in piecemeal fashion about them and about the samples that he has taken from them, scattering totals and percentages of cases between chapters and between text and notes. Counts of individuals included in various analyses often do not match, leaving little certainty about the size of his various data “samples.”

The study fails to reveal whether Baptists constituted a well-defined community, which would allow historical demographers to use Baptist membership to predict reproductive behavior, or whether they constituted an open and fluid community, which would threaten the whole point of comparing Baptist and Anglican demographic rates. On the one hand, in certain analyses, the study distinguishes between levels of belief—between Baptist church members and mere “hearers” who attended chapel services. Yet the author also suggests that local Anglicans showed some of the same evangelical sensibilities as their Baptist neighbors.

The book lacks the social-historical background to enable understanding how the communities under study fit into the various hypotheses that test the relationship between industrialization and demographic behavior. For this information, readers should consult the author’s previous publications. Finally, the volume is marred by a misuse of standard demographic terminology, confusion between tables and figures, repetition of wording in multiple places, and a lack of proofreading. The author does not seem to have had the patience to present his study in a manner that would allow readers to appreciate his findings or their possible importance to the field.