Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age

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Description

In the 1630s the Netherlands was once gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. Everyone knows the outline of the story—how differently sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had (and much that they didn’t) on tulip bulbs. We have heard how these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and how some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania is seen for example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation.
           
But it wasn’t like that. As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania, not this kind of stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that even as the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we generally tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is in a position to show us as a substitute the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age.
           
“Goldgar tells us at the start of her excellent debunking book: ‘Most of what we have heard of [tulipmania] isn’t true.’. . . She tells a new story.”—Simon Kuper, Financial Times

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