We turn at last to the “classic” debate (as I’ve called it) on population and agriculture in the preindustrial world. In this and the following chapter I summarize the debate as it had evolved through the 1990s. To do justice to the authors whose views I summarize, I need to lay out the logic of the debate as they have understood it. But that poses something of a problem for me, since I think that logic has been to some degree misdirected and confused – on both sides. In particular, there has been little explicit attention paid to what scale of analysis is likely to be most productive in moving the debate forward (see Chapters 1 and 2). Choice of scale is one of the most important decisions involved in designing any empirical research, but the population/agriculture debate has bounced back and forth between scales rather heedlessly. As a crude generality, it might be said that empirical studies have been conducted mostly at the microdemographic scale (that of individual farmers and their farms), whereas theoretical models have been formulated primarily at the macrodemographic scale (the whole population or farming system). Little thought has been given to how this disjunction might confound the comparison of empirical findings and theoretical expectations. I would guess that many empirical researchers have chosen the micro-level of study not for principled reasons but because a single fieldworker or a small team of fieldworkers cannot survey a wide area or a large number of people. Intellectually, the debate has been framed mostly at the macrodemographic level – again not deliberately but merely because that was the level at which the original framers conceived it.