[求助] Prep-1-essay 6的难句翻译，求批改

 今天做prep第一套, essay 6有几个句子看着很郁闷，为求甚解，就试着翻译了一下，希望牛牛们指点一下：）

Colonial historian David Allen's intensive study of five communities in seventeenth-century Massachusetts is a model of meticulous scholarship on the detailed microcosmic level, and is convincing up to a point.  Allen suggests that much more coherence and direct continuity existed between English and colonial agricultural practices and administrative organization than other historians have suggested.  However, he overstates his case with the declaration that he has proved "the remarkable extent to which diversity in New England local institutions was directly imitative of regional differences in the mother country."

Such an assertion ignores critical differences between seventeenth-century England and New England.  First, England was overcrowded and land-hungry; New England was sparsely populated and labor-hungry.  Second, England suffered the normal European rate of mortality; New England, especially in the first generation of English colonists, was virtually free from infectious diseases.  Third, England had an all-embracing state church; in New England membership in a church was restricted to the elect.  Fourth, a high proportion of English villagers lived under paternalistic resident squires; no such class existed in New England.  ¹By narrowing his focus to village institutions and ignoring these critical differences, which studies by Greven, Demos, and Lockridge have shown to be so important, Allen has created a somewhat distorted picture of reality.

²Allen's work is a rather extreme example of the "country community" school of seventeenth-century English history whose intemperate excesses in removing all national issues from the history of that period have been exposed by Professor Clive Holmes.  ³What conclusion can be drawn, for example, from Allen's discovery that Puritan clergy who had come to the colonies from East Anglia were one-third to one-half as likely to return to England by 1660 as were Puritan ministers from western and northern England?  ⁴We are not told in what way, if at all, this discovery illuminates historical understanding.  Studies of local history have enormously expanded our horizons, but it is a mistake for their authors to conclude that village institutions are all that mattered, simply because their functions are all that the records of village institutions reveal.

难句解析：

1)Allen所描绘的图景歪曲了真实情况，因为他仅仅关注乡村的组织机构并忽视了这些至关重要的不同之处，而这些不同经Greven,Demos and Lockridge研究显示是十分重要的。

2)Allen的研究是针对17世纪英国历史的”乡村社区”研究中的一个极端例子，它过于放肆的将Clive Holmes教授所揭示的所有国家的历史事件去除掉了。

3)根据Allen的研究中，我们可以对“在前往殖民地并于1660年返回英国的清教徒中，来自East Anglia的牧师人数仅为来自西部和北部英格兰的大臣的1/3到1/2”这一现象得到什么结论呢？

4)我们不能据此得到结论，就算他的发现阐明了历史的观点

划线部分即是。

我尤其对第3，第4句不甚明了，短语as likely as和if after all不知道怎么理解才合适，用法也忘记了，希望牛牛们提点~~十分感谢

p.s.四大在职攻gmat,在北京，今天刚开始，打算6,7月考，全靠CDer的鼓励支持，有志同道合者加我msn吧,一起努力：）

windywilling(A) hotmail.com

同问！