Finance as a discipline is a set of tools — for discounting the future, for pricing risk, for managing it. Twenty years applying those tools in modern markets made one thing plain: the questions the research is now asking, about who owns what, at what price, and why, are being answered every hour of every trading day, and were answered in the same terms three centuries ago. The move from a Master's in Economics at LSE to an MD chair on a trading floor, and back to a PhD in Economic History at LSE more than twenty years later, was never a discontinuity. It's the same set of questions, approached with digital tools that can now reveal the truth about their origins at population scale.