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...