The ideas we present here began to take shape long before we realized we were writing this book. In 1974, after I finished a PhD in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, I had the good fortune to find employment at the Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR), a research and graduate training center at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. My arrival at CEDEPLAR coincided with José Alberto's return from England, where he had completed a PhD at the London School of Economics, under the direction of William Brass. Jose Alberto's knowledge of Brazil's economic and political history and his expertise in demographic methods nicely complemented my background in sociology and my interest in development studies. In the process of working together on several projects, our respective interests consistently gravitated to that grey area where population and development research overlap. Over the years, it became increasingly evident to us that the field of demography could benefit from a greater sensitivity to the macrostructural issues that concerned students of development and social change, just as the field of development studies could benefit from a solid dose of demography. But precisely how we were going to build a better bridge between the two posed a major problem. Unhappy with the tendency to resort to ad hoc solutions tailored to the particular topic at hand, we searched instead for some way to situate population variables within a larger model of socioeconomic and political organization.