Today's risk is not a peasants' revolt, but a sovereign default
History teaches us that heavily indebted sovereigns will default, whether they are medieval English kings or 21st-century European governments
Stephen King, the group chief economist at HSBC, believes his profession has spent far too much time developing mathematical models of how markets work.
If economists really want to understand today's world, he argues, they should read history instead.
One episode from the past King believes would repay closer study is England's Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when mobs of angry agricultural labourers marched on London demanding an end to serfdom and the repeal of oppressive tax laws.
In his new book When the money runs out: the end of Western affluence, King argues that the revolt was caused by the failure of England's ruling classes - the monarchy, the church and the land-owning nobility - to appreciate that the structure of the country's economy had been fundamentally changed by a major disaster: in this case the Black Death.
Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the Black Death swept into Europe from China in the mid-14th century, wiping out somewhere between a third and a half of England's population.
The result was an acute labour shortage which threatened to shift the balance of economic power from the land-owners to their workers.