Economic history is increasingly able to provide us with evidence and inform pressing questions at the intersection of research and real-world decision-making. This column uses natural language processing and network analysis of articles from five leading journals over the past 25 years to identify a shift towards a more global, data-driven, and methodologically advanced field. It maps changing thematic priorities, institutional collaborations, and author networks, highlighting both a generational turnover and growing geographical diversity. It also reveals a strong move towards causal identification-based econometrics alongside a sharp decline in qualitative research, signalling both convergence and trade-offs in the discipline’s integration with mainstream economics.