This chapter reflects on the connections between financial history and history, with particular attention to the specific contribution of the historical approach to a field that necessarily also draws from other disciplines, especially economics. It provides a historiographical survey of a field that matured in the 1980s and 1990s and considers the new challenges and the new opportunities that arose prior to the turn of the twenty-first century, with the growing use of formal economic theory and high-powered statistical techniques, the deepening divorce between economic history and history, the rise of financial economics, and also the financial crisis of 2008. The chapter argues that in order to survive as a distinct specialism and provide an essential contribution to the understanding of financial phenomena, financial history will have to integrate new theoretical and methodological trends, but obey the fundamental principles of the historical approach.