An independent institute for historical macrofinance: research on the origins of capital markets, policy work grounded in that record, and practice that speaks the language of both.
Three aims
Empirical macrofinance at population scale on the first modern capital market, Britain from 1698 to 1827: asset pricing, intermediation, safe assets and the household balance sheet, measured for every named participant.
The questions of the present, fiscal sustainability, safe-asset supply, the plumbing of the global dollar system, read against the only complete record of how a reserve-currency market was built the first time.
A bridge between the trading floor and the archive: teaching, convening and public writing that make macrofinance legible to the people who move capital and the people who regulate it.
Flagship dataset
A relational database reconstructing individual holdings and lifetime portfolio returns for the universe of named British financial market participants across 130 years, from roughly two million manuscript images across six London archives. Complete market microstructure, with the investor's lifetime as the unit of analysis, reconciled into a double-entry frame in which every position has a counterparty and every balance foots.
~50m
Transactions
~500k
Named investors
130
Years, 1698 to 1827
~2m
Manuscript images, six archives
The identity layer beneath the dataset: every named market participant across 130 years of ledgers, resolved to one persistent unique identifier. A persistent identity engine, and a robust architecture for linking to future historical micro-datasets as they come online.
The Institute is founded and directed by an affiliated scholar at the London School of Economics, Department of Economic History. Governance and institutional details will follow.