Friends in Life and Death: British and Irish Quakers in the Demographic Transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Friends in life and death two distinguished historians join forces to exploit the exceptional riches offered by the records of British and Irish Quakers for the student of social, demographic, and familial change during the period 1650-1900. The authors have analyzed the experiences of more than 8,000 Quaker families, involving over 30,000 individuals, to produce an unparalleled study of patterns of child-bearing, marriage, and death among a major religious grouping. Professors Vann and Eversley show how Quaker values, both religious and economic, delayed marriage. The evidence suggests that in the seventeenth century some English Quakers practiced family limitation. English Quaker fertility, though rising to a peak from 1775 to 1825, was always lower than that of the Irish Quakers, who became one of the most fertile populations known to historical demographers. The mortality rate was high among urban Quakers prior to 1750, but better sanitation seems to have improved this. From 1825 onwards the number of births steadily declined, showing Quakers to have been in the vanguard of the move towards the small, modern family. The authors, wherever possible, compare the Quakers in the British Isles with the contemporary population of Britain and Ireland as a whole, as well as with that of France, Quebec, and the American colonies. Friends in life and death will thus make a contribution to our understanding of the social and economic history not only of this prominent British cultural group, but also that of other societies
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".