Chris Cook is former Head of the Modern Archives Unit at the London School of Economics. Editor of the best-selling Pears Cyclopaedia for over thirty years, his is also author of The Routledge Companion to European History since 1763,The Routledge Companion to World History since 1914 and The Routledge Companion to Britain in the 19th Century.

'Everyone involved in the history of democracy, research into electoral systems or in political journalism should make a daily obeisance to Chris Cook and urge the gods to make him immortal. For over thirty years he has assiduously produced a stream of remarkably reliable statistical volumes on a commendably wide area of national and international topics, all of which have shortened considerably the amount of time each of us would otherwise need to spend digging out crucial facts. This current volume is but the latest in along line of such tomes'. - Michael Meadowcroft, Representation

• Introduction and Acknowledgements. Abbreviations of Major Record Repositories Part 1: Checklist of Archives of Organisations and Societies (A-Z) Part 2: Personal Archive Collections. Appendix 1: The Colonial Records Survey. Appendix 2: The Military Records Survey. Appendix 3: A Note on Electronic Pathways