Applied history has been tied almost exclusively to issues of national policy and decision-making in the public sphere. We can attribute (or blame) the field’s founders, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, for this narrow-sightedness.

In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, the Iron Bank is a quietly menacing figure that lingers in the background of Westeros’s civil war. The exact power wielded by the world’s most powerful financial institution is made clear when the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister informs the Iron Bank that she would delay repayment indefinitely. In response to Cersei’s default, her creditor throws its financial heft behind another rival, quadrupling his forces overnight and shifting the war’s balance in one fell swoop.