Reconciling micro and macro approaches in historical demography: An European population database.

The proposal presented here is based on two central ideas. Firstly, the proliferation of demographic studies in recent decades has made it virtually impossible to recover information in order to carry out demographic syntheses. Consequently, the academic community would bene t considerably from the creation of a European database for the registration of demographic series (overall population per decade and vital statistics) for every political-administrative unit, ranging from the parish/village to dioceses/counties/districts. Secondly, and complementary to the rst proposal, researchers and agencies that sponsor research projects should promote the territorial coverage of European areas that have not yet been studied, based on representative samples.