This book does not set out to prove a point or to make grand claims. It offers a more basic service, namely to give a thorough and accurate account of a body of international law, outlining the relevant rules, setting them in a form of historical context and providing a guide to their interpretation and application by states, in accordance with orthodox positivist methodology.

What emerges, however, in some small way, is also the story of an idea – the idea that cultural property constitutes a universal heritage. What the record shows is that this imaginative construct-cum-metaphysical conviction has inspired the development of international rules and institutions reflective of its logic, has served in its own right as an internal and external restraint on the wartime conduct of states, and continues to inform how they interpret and apply the positive law.

On a less abstract level, the material presented in the following chapters points towards three broad conclusions.

First, states and other past parties to armed conflict have placed more and more sincere value over the last two hundred years on sparing and safeguarding immovable and movable cultural property than might be assumed. Perhaps this is not saying much, given the popular assumption that cultural property has always been deliberately attacked and looted in war, or its protection at best ignored. It is, nonetheless, a useful corrective to such unhistorical thinking.