At a time of ongoing crisis and transformation in financial relations, structures and processes, it would be all too easy to limit our geographical explorations of finance to the narrow temporal window of the early-twenty-first-century here-and-now. Fortunately, recent years have seen the publication of a number of studies that examine geographies of finance in a much wider array of historical contexts. This article reports on the findings of such studies. Reading them in the light of Foucault’s injunction to write histories explicitly of the present, it argues that they provide an essential historical-geographical foundation for understanding the more immediate geographies of contemporary – and perhaps future – financial worlds.