This introductory chapter outlines the scope of generation and reproduction and argues that they should be more central to histories of health and medicine, the family and agriculture, and to historical writing more generally. It reviews how in the 1970s several intellectual enterprises—feminism, Michel Foucault’s account of biopower and François Jacob’s argument for a shift ‘from generation to reproduction’—engaged critically with pre-existing fields—histories of medical disciplines, of population, of ideas and of the family—to generate approaches that are still influential but did not coalesce into a new history of reproduction. It discusses how the major changes in historical practice that have accompanied an outpouring of histories of reproduction over the last thirty years have favoured studies of single topics, periods and places within rather separate sub-disciplines. We stress the new opportunities thus created for charting continuity and change, and that by standing back and drawing recent work together we can see beyond the old big pictures. We preview the structure of the book and outline how it tracks the reworking of an influential body of ideas and practice, primarily in the Mediterranean, western Europe, North America and their empires, from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present day.