Preface to the English edition -- Introduction to the French edition -- The ancient world -- The classical world : from Greek city states to the Roman Empire -- Archives and archival practices in Asia and Africa : from antiquity to the eighteenth century -- Archives and archival practices in the Americas up to the eighteenth century -- In the chanceries and muniment rooms of medieval Europe, fifth to fifteenth centuries -- Buildings and equipment in Western Europe : late antiquity to the seventeenth century -- The defining era : Simancas, the Habsburgs and the sixteenth century -- Bureaucracy and archival centralisation in early modern Europe -- Being an archivist in early modern Europe -- Methods and techniques for classification and arrangement : fifteenth to eighteenth centuries -- Legislation, literature and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Buildings and readers, nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Archives destroyed, protected and reconstructed : nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- The rise of a profession, nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- From mutual assistance to international networks, nineteenth and twentieth centuries -- Conclusion: The value of the historical perspective -- Afterword to the English edition.

A revised translation of the classic Une histoire de l'archivistique, published in 1998.