Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

Conflicts and wars, and more specifically the 2011 Revolution in Egypt, have brought to light the worrying question of the preservation of the cultural heritage in the world. The role of museums and international institutions have become ever more important in this respect. Recognizing that cultural treasures can form the basis for education and economic prosperity, the organizers devoted the 29th Annual Meeting of ICOM's International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG) to the theme of "Collections at Risk: New Challenges in a New Environment." The present volume contains several of the papers read during those sessions in Brussels in 2012, and gives a clear example of the multifarious paths that lay open to obtaining the objective of preserving the past for the future.