In preceding chapters, I have urged repeatedly, first, that the population/agriculture debate needs to be disaggregated to some spatial scale lower than the total population and, second, that the household, the most conspicuous functional group in the everyday working life of all preindustrial farming communities, is the best place to start the disaggregation. Note that I say “start”: other scales may turn out to be useful – perhaps even more useful for some purposes – but the household level would seem, as many researchers have suggested, to be the smallest scale that as a general rule captures the essential processes linking traditional farming and demography (Laslett, 1983; Fricke, 1984; Netting, 1993).