Razib, 
 
Interesting issues, data, and plots.   I wonder if you could examine correlations between major religions and government-restrictions and social-hostilities?  It looks like it would be high with Islam.  Also, could the position of India reflect its long history with Islam and Christian colonials?  India gave birth to many religions and might have been different in the past.

harsh!

i can't add! 
 
and yeah, wuz sentimental. i get that way when the amt of prose is minimal. cheap way to produce content.

"61.4% were British & Irish .. 11.6% of continental origin .. and 19.3% were black."  Who made up the balance?

But, but, but .. the "Nobel Prize" for Economics is no such thing - just a low attempt by the Swedish Central Bank to hijack the prestige of the real Nobel prizes.

"Dutch Kings in England": just the one. But Frogs, Krauts and Jocks galore, plus Danes and Welshish. Even a few Englishmen.

The obvious reason that the best domestic neolitihic site in Britain is Skara Brae in Orkney is that Orkney has no trees.

His late colleague, Tanta, was excellent.

Lord, I hate that shitty scientific English. How about "The surface area of the parietal lobe is greater in men than in women"? If you find "greater" rather archaic, replace it by "bigger".

Milton's "Oh Lord avenge thy slaughtered saints" was about Protestants in (if memory serves) Italy. They existed, but not for long. Recall too the extreme brutality of the 13th Century Crusade against the Cathars (Albigensians), which was by Northern Frenchmen, on behalf of the Roman Church, against Southern French heretics. 
 
In parts of Northern Europe the Reformation was very easy because the Roman Catholic church was so decayed - that's why the Reformation in, for example, Scotland had little bloodshed - they were pushing on a door that just collapsed. The Church of Scotland then took centuries to restore Christianity into the virtually re-heathenised parts of the Highlands. In some spots they lost the race to Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic priests. I suspect that much of Ireland was similarly reclaimed from heathenism by Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic priests. In Scotland, and I suspect Ireland, talk of the "Old Religion" is, I suggest, an attempt to imply a continuity that didn't exist (in addition, of course, to trying to distract attention from Rome's break from the the rest of old Catholicism).

@pconroy: A lengthy civil war will indeed lead to many deaths by "plague, famine, hardship", but your citation said that "550,000 Irish were killed by the English", which is an entirely different claim. If you actually meant "the rebellion by the Catholic Confederation lead to the deaths of 550,000 (or 616,000) of their countrymen" you should have said so. But I still think the figure implausibly high: your ancestors and mine may have been bloody fools to stage their rebellion but I doubt that they need have half-a-million deaths on their conscience. A death rate of getting towards 50% when the war involved armies of just a few thousand? Dr Petty was a distinguished chap, but he arrived in Ireland in 1652 when the war was about over. I'd like to know what modern historians think. The 30 Years War on the Continent, which was in some ways the backdrop to the British Civil Wars, lasted three times as long as the period that interests you and involved much, much bigger armies. One of its historians, C V Wedgewood, wrote "Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century no estimate of the loss of life and wealth was too extravagant for belief. The population was supposed to have sunk by three quarters... The more critical research of the last three generations [she wrote in the 1930s] has revealed ... that contemporary figures are unreliable...". She remarks on how much smaller the destructive powers of armies were then, compared to her day. She says "the figures, which have been confused over the generations by propaganda of different kinds, are extremely difficult to establish with any certainty". Another comparison would be England and Scotland; the Civil War armies there were much bigger than in Ireland; their economies were in some ways more vulnerable, being more based on arable land and trade rather than pastoralism - you can drive your cows to safety in Ireland, but your English crops are burned, your trade-based occupations destroyed. The Royalists did commit a nasty slaughter of civilians in Bolton; Irish troops likewise in Aberdeen, and those same gentlemen attempted a genocidal cleansing of Campbells from Argyll. But no one that I've ever read cites total death rates anywhere near your proposed figures. All in all, the figures you cited seem to me probably to fall into Wedgewood's categories of "too extravagant" and "propaganda". But if you can point me to recent researches, I'll take correction.

@pconroy: Ranelagh's "A Short History of Ireland" gives some numbers too. He reckons the Protestant deaths in 1641 at 12,000, rather than 2,000, has a Scots Parliamentary army losing 3,000 dead at the Battle of Benburb in 1646 and gives Cromwell's army as totalling 20,000. He gives 2,600 men of the Royalist garrison at Drogheda killed. (Which reminds me that the Catholic forces who had started off agin the King were now on his side. Tricky bugger, Civil War.) That's all the numbers I see there for the period 1641-1652. Again, there's nothing there that could get anywhere near hundreds of thousands of deaths.

@pconroy: I suspect that it's not just your Drogheda figures that are wrong. "from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English": that sounds to me to be most unlikely. My Irish grandfather used to recommend that one should never believe any Irishman's account of Irish history. Just whose account one might believe he never did say, so I've ignored the old boy and had a quick look at the relevant bit of Roy Foster's "Modern Ireland". His numbers start with the massacre of Protestants in 1641, which he estimates as 2000 "casualties" - but I think he means deaths. Thereafter there was war between the "Confederate Catholics", as they styled themselves, and the King. The size of the King's army is pretty small: 10,000 Scots in 1642. Once the King had lost the Civil Wars in England and Scotland, in 1647 a Parliamentarian army was sent to Dublin - 2000 men. Anyway, by 1649 there had been 8 years of intermittent war in Ireland with Royal armies of a few thousand and no comment by Foster on the scale of casualties, save for the 1641 massacre. I take it that there isn't the remotest chance of deaths being in the hundreds of thousands in this period. Cromwell's army arrived in 1649, so if you seek massive numbers of deaths it must be compressed into 3 years. I look here for gory tales of half-a-million deaths, and all I find is in a footnote "It [the Irish population] had certainly dropped; 34,000 soldiers emigrated, and others were conscripted or 'sold abroad'. 'Slave-hunts' certainly happened, though there extent has been exaggerated; there were possibly 12000 Irish in the West Indies by the late 1660s". If I may say so, 550,000 my left foot!

How tall are you, asked the nurse. Six two and a half, I said. Oh no, she said, you're much taller than that. No, I said, it's just that I'm the only man you've ever met who's six two and a half and doesn't lie about it.

Where I grew up, the pubs and the brewery were nationalised. It had been done during WWI, to try to stop the Irish labour in the munitions factories going to work drunk and blowing them up. It survived until the early 70s.

"Central Europe" moved west after WWII, much as what used to be the Near East is now the Middle East.

Be civil? No Finnish jokes, then?

I've read that JFK gained more from the votes of bigotted Catholics than he lost by the votes of bigotted Protestants and Jews. That might imply that increasing homogenisation might make it harder for a Catholic to be elected.

S/g, by golly you're right. I stand corrected: never met one, but have lusted after one.

The British school system has collapsed.