Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Introduction to the French edition (1998) -- Introduction to the English edition -- 1 The ancient world -- 2 The classical world: from Greek city states to the Roman empire -- 3 Archives and archival practices in Asia and Africa, antiquity to the eighteenth century -- 4 Archives and archival practices in the Americas, to the eighteenth century -- 5 In the chanceries and muniment rooms of medieval Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries -- 6 Buildings and equipment in Western Europe, late antiquity to the seventeenth century -- 7 The defining era: Simancas, the Habsburgs and the sixteenth century -- 8 State bureaucracy and archival centralisation in early modern Europe -- 9 Being an archivist in early modern Europe -- 10 Methods and techniques for classification and arrangement in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries -- 11 Legislation, literature and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- 12 Buildings and readers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- 13 Archives destroyed, protected and reconstituted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- 14 The rise of a profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- 15 From mutual assistance to international networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- 16 Conclusion: the value of the historical perspective -- Afterword to the English edition -- Index