Welcome to the website for the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, which was established in July 2009 with a generous grant of seed money from Winton Capital Management.

Despite the resurgence of interest in the history of financial capitalism sparked by the current global economic crisis, our centre and the Winton Institute for Monetary History at Oxford are the only two dedicated research centres for financial or monetary history in British Isles. With distinguished Faculties of History and of Economics and with a business school that boasts an impressive endowment to fund research in modern finance, Cambridge offers the ideal location for such a venture.

The Centre's core mission is to facilitate cutting-edge research in financial history, to encourage its application to economic theory and to public policy, and to explore rigorous and lasting platforms for the dissemination of the fruits of research in financial history. The Centre not only serves the Cambridge community as one of the seven constituent centres of Cambridge Finance, but also hopes to bring together financial historians at British and Irish institutions to work on collaborative ventures. In Cambridge, we participate in the History Faculty's Economic and Social History sub-group, where we offer an MPhil paper on financial history. We always welcome enquiries from postgraduate research students about affiliating with the centre. Our Financial History Seminar Series (which meets fortnightly in term) is open to the public, but did not run in Michaelmas 2011 because we have agreed to participate in the Core Seminar in the History Faculty. We will resume in Lent 2012 with the following schedule. We have also agreed to host the Cambridge Finance Weekly Workshop Series which meets on Tuesdays at 5.0.

The re-development of the European State Finance Database and our first annual conference in March 2010 on 'Questioning "Credible Commitment"' offer examples of our approach to interdisciplinary work in financial history. Dr Coffman also holds an INET grant to digitise the English Corn Returns, 1770-1865. In the same vein, our second annual conference on 'Ottoman-European Exchanges in Commerce, Finance and Culture, c.1450-c.1914' was in March 2011. In November, our director, Dr Coffman, convened the 22nd Annual EHS Women's Workshop on 'Housing and Housing Markets in Historical Perspective' on 12 November. We also co-sponsored, in conjunction with the Cambridge University History Society (Clio), a debate on 'Expansionary Fiscal Contraction' at the Cambridge Union on 29 November.

We just held a symposium entitled 'Towards a Structural Analysis of the Eurozone Crisis' in which we discussed the themes to be explored in our third annual conference in September 2012. Check back for details.

We are currently compiling a global register of financial historians. If you would like to join our register or the mailing list, please contact the director.