Happy Saturday. One of our episodes on the show this week was a brief history of Gardening, and we mentioned in that episode that we have some other gardening adjacent topics in our back catalog. Several of them have been Saturday classics relatively recently, so we went way back, way back for this one. It is our February seven episode on tulip Mania, and this episode was from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Dablina. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deleted chalk Reboarding, and we're going to start off today's episode with a little story, a legend, and it's about a merchant in seventeenth century Holland and he greets one of his ships just arrived from abroad, and he gives a sailor on board a herring for lunch, very generous of him. And the sailor is looking for a little something to eat with his harring, a little side dish, looking around the ship and he finds some root like vegetables on board and he thinks they're onions, so he cuts him up and he fries them with some oil and vinegar or some sort of condiments to to make them tasty, and he eats them with his fish, And through this sailor's innocent mistake, the merchant ends up losing more on the meal than he would have if he had bought the prince himself the finest feast in the land. Um. So you'll you've probably heard this story before, and you'll find it rehashed and retold in tons of sources and articles that you might read in your favorite business journal today. And it really epitomizes the financial bubble that shook the seven trade Dutch Republic, which, as the story goes, rich and poor people like speculated on tulip bulbs, and um, they were destroyed when ultimately the market dropped before the bulbs that even bloomed. And almost since then, this little tale not just the story of the bulbs mistake and its onions, but this greater story has been an anecdote for business writers to use as a cautionary tale as as something to watch out for. Don't get too crazy about get rich quick schemes, or you might find yourselves like the Dutch. Yeah, I know what you're eating. That's another aspect. It was another left them learned. And one reason you'll find that this Harrying Exotic onion side dish story and print so frequently is because it really makes a nice historical counterpart to current events. Um articles about the dot com bubble, housing bubble, even a tiny bubble of beanie babies that happened in the late nineties. So I'm proud I was not part of that bubble. Even I was probably a really at risk population to be part of it, but I avoided it. And yeah, it's just to give you an example though, of how often this story is used by business writers. UM. I found this particular version in The Economist, So, I mean, there you go kind of one of the ultimates there. Um, but we're gonna be talking about the tulip bubble or tulip mania, it's called lots of different things, and try to figure out why the bottom fell out, and also sort of throw a wrench in the mix here and talk about the revisionist history that's really changed the story a lot in the past year, or at least gotten a lot of people thinking. Um. But before we we go into the trade as a whole. We've got to discuss the history of the commodity itself. Tulips, which have a pretty pretty interesting history. Unless, say, for for a flower that you that looks like an onion, potentially us. They do, and writer Anna Pavard, who wrote just one of the surprisingly large number of books on tulips that have come out since, said that the tulip is a flower that has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual, and cultural baggage than any other on earth. So put that in your face. I know, I never knew what you think of it, um, but the tulip used to just be another wildflower. Of course, it didn't start with this history. It was one that grew in Turkey and Central Asia, and there are still more than one hundred species there today. I looked them up online. They're really pretty. They don't look that much like I mean, you can tell they're related, but they don't look that much like the tulips that you might grow in your garden today. They're they're sort of pointier and a little more open with like buttercups or something rather than Holland grown tulips. Sounds very nice with the Ottomans. They brought these bulbs into their courtyards and domestic hated them, and they were just obsessed, as the Dutch would become with these flowers. There. They liked the long, narrow flowers with the pointy petals, and they used them as a decorative motif and things like embroidery and tiles that even had a special vase for one blossom. But by the mid fifteen hundreds tulips were brought to Europe by Ogier jes Lan de Buzbek, the ambassador for Ferdinand the First of Austria to Suleiman the Magnificent. Yeah, and a little side note on this ambassador here. Um. We mentioned in the earlier episode on Cinderella of the Harem that Suleiman sort of started this tradition of not speaking to ambassadors presented at his court, and so we can imagine that Ogier jes Lan definitely suffered under this cold eye of Suleiman Um. At one point, actually he more than suffered. At one point the Sultan placed him under house arrest. He was eventually freed um. And when he does come back to Austria, he brought not only tulips, seeds, not tulip bulbs tulip seeds which take a really really long time to turn them into tulips. But he didn't just bring back those. He brought back lilacs and and gora goats too, which I guess that's why he didn't bring the bulbs. The goats probably took a lot of room. Yeah, they sound like they'd be pretty tough to transport. Holland, though, had to wait a few more years for tulips. But in fIF Careless Clusius, who was the prefect of the Imperial herb Gardens in Vienna, he brought some bulbs with him when he immigrated and headed up to a new botanical gardens in Leiden, So basically he was taking a new position and brought them along. Um Eclusius he bred these tulips mostly for medicinal purposes, but he considered them to be beautiful too, so dual purpose there well. And I have one more thing to add about the medicinal purposes. I'm not sure what these medicinal purposes were because I looked into it, and um tulips, especially their bulbs, are filled with glycosides which are extremely toxic and according to the Nova Scotia Museum. During World War two, Um, some starving Dutch cattle and people had to resort eating bulbs, and they would get quite sick from it. Um. So y'all should actually all thank Develina for making me go look up why Closius was using these for medicinal purposes before I like accidentally recommended that tulips made good medicine. And everybody ate the bulbs that they had just brought from pikes or something. Stick to your pharmacies, guys, that's our official recommendation. But luckily uh Clusius here, as I said, he uh, he also loved the bulbs for their beauty, and many other people did too. He really had a hard time preventing the bulbs from being stolen out of his garden. So the attraction begins. Yeah, it definitely begins with his garden. Um, and presumably it's from these stolen bulls and others hopefully purchased legitimately. Um, that a trade in tulips emerges, and the traders are called bloom Aston, which means tulip traders. It also kind of means tulip fanciers or tulip enthusiasts, which is something that you should keep in mind when we get into the speculative nature of this later story. Um, but yeah, I mean basically, the point is that these first traders love tulips to They're not just in it for the money. They're collectors. And this is a time when collecting things for your curio is really really popular. Um, when you would you'd add up seashells and and things like that, interesting rocks and minerals, um and display them, and it would show that you were uh educated, cultured person. So you had to have a love for um. And you also had to have some good faith to deal in tulips too. And here's why. Traditionally the trade, the tulip trade was done in the summer. Flowers bloomed in May or June, and after that the bulb was dug up and it was kept too dry indoors. The bulbs then had to be inspected and they were sold just before they were replanted in September, so the seller would deliver the bulb and the buyer would pay up. Yeah. So the issue here is pretty apparent. It's that if you're the buyer, you don't know exactly what you're getting. You don't know if it's the same ball that one that you contracted for. You don't know if it's the bulb that you saw bloom and it looks so pretty last spring, and you don't know if it's a bulb that's going to perform as well as the one you saw. I mean, there's already going to be a little uncertainty in any kind of horticultural pursuit. But there's the potential for deception here too, which made people pretty nervous. And to make matters worse, bulbs bought in the ground didn't always bloom as people expected them to, even if they were the same, even if there wasn't some sort of fraud happening. And that's partly because the most popular tulips at the time we're called broken tulips and um. If you if you look at an old water color or painting of tulips, you're probably looking at broken tulips. They have these feather flame petals um on a light background, so something like red or purple as stripe going up the middle of each petal, and the tulip would bloom like a normal solid color tulip one year, and then the next year it would bloom as this broken flower. Uh, like a total surprise to everyone, it seemed, and it's descendants, any any descendant from that bulb would also bloom splotched and broken. And so at the time people didn't know why this happened. It seemed like pure chance. But these were the tulips they wanted. Today we know that ironically, it's caused by a virus which is delivered by aphids. And because the broken tulips were I mean, I don't want to stay sick. They're not. They're not unable to to thrive in a certain sense, but they are a little bit weaker. Because they're weaker, the bulbs reproduced, they didn't reproduce as fast as a good, unaffected, healthy bulb should, and so it drove up the price. It made these broken flowers even more valuable and more desirable. And were you saying that, um, with the blotching us, the splotching us on the pedal, you couldn't tell how it would be splotched. Yeah, that was a chance too. So maybe it was some ugly splatch he didn't like, or maybe it was these perfect flames going up the middle of the pedal. Um, So you didn't know what you were going to get even if you were dealing with someone who was trustworthy. So the most expensive tool at the time was Semper Augustus, which was a red and white striped variety and it went for thousand florins, which was six times the annual income of an average person at that time. Yeah, but even as early as sixteen ten, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a single rare bulb made an acceptable dowry and an entire brewery. And I like I think the Encyclopedia mentioned specifically a thriving brewery in France was sold for one bulb, one highly coveted bulbs. So we see these examples of people getting pretty obsessed with tulips early on. But it was in sixteen thirty four sixteen thirty five, depending on which source you look at, that prices got really really high, and at that point business started to change and so instead of the system Dablina described a minute ago where the bulbs were sold in late summer when they were dug up, the bulbs were now sold by weight while they were still in the ground. Um, so this is fundamental changing the process of the tulip trade. Yeah, you may wonder how they could even pull this off. Well, what would happen is you'd get the details of the bulb, what its weight was planting, it's expected weight comes September, but that's it. There was no bold, so it was actual paper descriptions of the bulbs that were sold instead of the bulbs themselves. So you imagine like getting this piece of paper for something that you've paid money for. It's kind of um. I mean, imagine if you were buying tulips now for your garden and that was the deal you've got, you probably wouldn't be very happy with it. Um And to to deal with this new system, this um this selling by weight system TOOLIP bulbs even got their own unit of measure called the azen I think also called aces, where one of this unit equalled about zero point zero zero one eight ounces, so super super tiny units of measure as it would have to be. But for the Bloomston there was money to be made even if the price per oz and didn't change. As long as your bulbs grew in the ground, your profits were going to climb. So as demand continued to grow for these the offsets started to sell as well as mature bulbs, which means offsets were basically they were bull bull bets. Yeah, they were little bull bets. They took three to five years to produce flowers of their own, So pretty risky venture. Yeah, definitely more so than getting the pieces of paper instead of your actual bulb, because you're no longer even buying a bulb that well, yeah, I saw that bull bloom in May just this year. It's maybe fingers crossed little blue bloom in three to five years. Um, So a very risky business. And by sixty six there's a futures market to where buyers would contract to buy an in ground bulb at a set price, gambling that it would eventually, when it was finally dug up, it would be worth more than the expected value, and UM contracts themselves were bought and sold, and I think UM people who were a little skeptical of this whole market called the whole thing the wind trade, because you never knew which way the wind would blow UM, and you ultimately had to hope that there would be someone at the end who would pay up when those bulbs came out of the ground. That was what they were all gambling on. UM. To make matters worse, buyers start buying without the money, so they're buying on credit, and the sellers accept that because they're gambling on the fact that the buyer himself will probably be able to sell at a higher price eventually as well. Again all counting on that one person at the end of the chain who's willing to pay out, and the fact that the bulb actually turns out the way it's planned. A lot of bets going on here. So how high did this actually go? How much were people actually spending on these bulbs. Well, there's some information from seven floating around a nursery catalog actually from a Harlem florist, and it lists the name, weight and price of a tulip viceroy for example. There were lists of other tulips as well, but for this tulip viceroy, a lightweight bulb sold for three thousand guilders. A heavy bulb sold for four thousand, two hundred. So the low price here was twenty times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. Yeah, and I mean again, we we need to point out a few things. Even with this, we don't know if if this tulip bulb viceroy sold for this amount or if this is all part of the speculation, but it was the offering price um, and it's it really is kind of a I don't want to say unique, but um a rare statistic from this time of of a tulip bulbs name and its price and its weight all being put out there. We don't have that much information about it. Um. And this whole era is sort of filled with these legends. There's another really great one from this time which might even be utter known than that herring onion bulb beginning that we told him that the legend of the black Tulip, which ultimately inspired Alexander Dumas novel also called the Black tulip Um. This one, this one is starting to show that there's bad feelings in the tulip trade. It goes like this, There's a group of Harlem florists and they hear that a cobbler at the Hague has produced a black tulip, a rare coveted black tulip, and they go to him and they have a with him for a while, and they finally work out a deal. They buy it for one thousand and five hundred florins and as soon as it's theirs. They take it and they throw it on the ground and they stomp it to bits, and they tell him that he's a fool to have produced this black tulip and to have sold it to them for so little. They would have given him ten thousand florins if he had asked, And they tell him that he'll never ever be so lucky again to breathe this black tulip. And as the story goes, he's so distraught that he takes to bed and he dies. Of course that has to be the end to the moral fairy tale kind of black story. Yeah, but there's there's a lot of bitterness even if we even if we step away from this like obviously polemical story. Yeah, it was bitterness about the people who quite didn't understand the tulip thing or didn't thought it was kind of crazy, kind of out there, but probably like a lot of people now do. Um. For example, Harlem priest Theodicus Cats wrote to his nephew on February five, sixteen thirty seven, that like the plague that had been bad since sixty five, now quote another sickness had risen. It is the sickness of the bloom aston and Floriston. Also, historian Theodoras Trevilius wrote a much later. In sty eight, he wrote a letter that said, quote, I don't know what kind of angry spirit was called it from hell, but our descendants doubtless will laugh as a at the human insanity of our age that in our times the tulip flowers have been so revered. So yeah, a lot of self criticism even at the time, Um, like what are we doing spending all of this money and obsessing over tulips? So surprise, surprise, by February seven, the market collapses. Supposedly, as the traditional story goes, Um, it's because an expected buyer fails to show up and the whole market loses confidence. But more likely it's just that people started to realize around this time that the paper chain of buying and trading these these little descriptions of tulips that are in the ground, would only work and they would only make their profit if there was a buyer at the end, as we mentioned before. So yeah, like if I bought a tulip from you to Blina and I was trying to make money off of it, I would know that I had to get our producer, Jerry to buy the bulb ultimately, because if she didn't buy it, then I'd be left with the toolip bulb and trying to decide if I even wanted to pay you for it, so it might all end up on your lap. No way, cracking skulls at that point. Um. So the sellers want their money, but there's really no way to enforce these oral agreements. Um. As Sarah mentioned, they probably weren't as violent as I just was. Um. By March or so, it suggested that all trades since the previous September be nullified. But at that point the High Court steps in. They say, basically, deal with it. We don't want to deal with it. What they say is all transactions remain in force, but deal with it yourself. Don't come to us about it, essentially, And so I mean, just one example of how people tried to deal with it, there was a self established commission of tradesmen set up in Harlem and they decided that the contracts there would be settled for three point five percent of the purchase price. And of course nobody is happy this. It's a lose lose situation for everyone. If you are left with the bulb, you are expecting a lot more for that, and you know, presumably you've been making some bets yourself. If you're stuck paying three point five percent of the purchase price, you're just throwing away money essentially. So at this point the story gets kind of mythic again, and you know, it's kind of like the black tulip. So supposedly the bubble bust just shakes the Dutch economy to a tremendous extent because the investment is so widespread up their speculators across classes, so bankruptcy is common and um people lose their houses and their businesses for tulips, and it becomes the classic cautionary tale of being a little more careful with your money, and sort of the poster boy for it is Jan van Goyen, who was an artist and supposedly died in debt because of tulips. Well we'll find out a little bit more about that lately later. He did die in debt, but not necessarily because of his tulip speculation. So, needless to say, it's painted as a pretty dire situation, and it's easy to see how it was used as a cautionary tale recently, though there's been a little bit of a shift in how some people look at the tulip bubble. For example, writer and gold Girl suggested in two thousand sevens tulip Mania, Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age that the idea that the tulip Mania was economically devastating to Holland is the result of a few contemporary polemical pamphlets which were written to basically make people more prudent in their own business affairs. These, in turn, she suggests, we're taken up by historians and gradually filtered into fact. So yeah, and and sort of to add to that, because because this story has so frequently been used as an anecdote, it sort of took on a sheen of current bubble comparison. So if you're if you're writing about the south Sea bubble, or if you're writing about housing housing today, yeah, it takes on a little bit of whatever you're comparing it to. And in a review for Reviews in History, j Leslie Price wrote that the book was quote determinedly revisionists. So, I mean, I really think this this book kind of shook up the tulip story. But um, to add to that, recently, a lot of economists have debated whether it was a bubble at all, and and there are precise economic definitions for for what that means that we're not going to get into. But um, it seems to be like maybe a fun exercise for economists or or perhaps the serious study um to figure out if there was a bubble and then to debate either for or against it. Yes, there was a bubb will know there were market reasons behind it. Um, it's it's created a whole whole new topic of discussion for these tulips. Yeah. And similarly, I think looking at gold Girl's argument is kind of a fun exercise for historians as well, because she's just sort of searching for the source that this tale came from in the first place. Definitely, I always I always like when I get a surprise like this in an episode. I mean, I'm always relieved that I found this update to the story. It terrifies me that I won't someday. But um, it's it's fun for us for sure. Yeah. So just a little bit on Goldger's argument. Most of her revision, so to speak, come at the sake of traditional tulip sources or the canon. You might say yeah, um. And a lot of our traditional sources on tulipmania come from Charles McKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which was published in eighteen forty one. It's a pretty popular book. It's actually still in print. I looked it up, you could, you could order it um, and it paints a lot of these really exciting stories about the bubble, like the mistaken onions and things like oxen cheese and clothes being traded for one vice. Roy bulb Um the really picturesque accounts of the story. But as gold Guard and Covered it turned out, Charles McKay's main source was Johann Backman, who wrote a history of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins in and Beckman is an interesting character because he seems to be one of the first major people who projected his contemporary concerns onto the Dutch bubble, so economic concerns for his time. Um. And he may have also been the guy who gave us the idea that the bubble burst because the bloomist and became pure speculators. They weren't just collectors anymore. And he seemed to view this almost as as expected that, well, surely you wouldn't just be tulip fanciers and spend these huge amounts of money. But he wrote, quote, how ridiculous would it have been to purchase useless roots with their weight in gold? If the possession of the flower had been the only object? Pretty I guess he did, wasn't in a tulips? Apparently not? So he his argument kind of relies on Abraham Munting, a botanical writer from the seventeenth century whose father lost money on tulips. But since Munting was too young to be their firstand his sources also came from somewhere else, So his sources came from a chronicle or named Luva von Night Seema in sixteen sixty nine, and also a propaganda piece by Audrey and Roman from sixteen thirty seven. So I Seema was also drawing from sources from pamphlets. And we're left at this point with pamphlets as like the basis the main source for all of this stuff. When we filter it all down, when you filter it all down to the bottom, that's what you get. And so of course the pamphlets are gonna be anti speculation, They're going to be encouraging people to not go out and blow all their money on tulips. But it's interesting because Goldgert also takes a closer look at a few of the most famous Mania anecdotes and assumptions. For instance, the artists I mentioned earlier who died in debt. For example, he did die in debt, but it was much later in sixteen fifty six, perhaps in debt for yet another speculative scheme, but not tulips. And another issue that Goldgirl addresses is the idea that the bubble had such a tremendously broad effect on the economy because so many people were involved, rich people, poor people, people in between. Instead, she argues that the bloom Aston were this really tight knit group of people who worked together for years and years and years. Most of them loved collecting tulips as well as trading them, and they would meet in inns and dispute tulip, you know, have tulip talk with each other and dispute and exchange and trade. And so certain members of the Bloomaston were obviously severely shaken by the crash, but their numbers were smaller than often thought. And of course, even if you were a speculator, you didn't get into too much trouble if you were in the middle of that chain, because hopefully things would cancel, cancel, other things out, other debts and credits. Um. So just sort of suggesting that maybe there was a smaller pool of people affected by this crisis. Yeah, the entirety of Holland wasn't devastated because of this, uh, the tulip bubble. Yeah, but gold Girl also suggests that the bubble was indeed a social and cultural crisis, so she doesn't deny that in her book at all. Yeah, a real value shock for the people of the country. And in the exteen thirties, the Dutch Republic was in boom times. It was really good period, and capitalism was sort of taking off, but didn't quite sit right with everybody yet, and the bubble scared people for a few reasons, apparently enough to make them right some of these very angry concerned pamphlets. So a few of those scary things, I mean, the main one is that buyers were nagged after prices fell. Nobody likes to see that. That's a that's a bad sign for business. And then there was the fact that the sellers basically had no recourse to get their money back. Um, this one is interesting, Um, the menon Nights. This was one of the reasons is that the Mennonites, who refused to swear oaths and were considered very trustworthy, they were also involved in the tulip trade and that act of broken promises, and so it was sort of like, if you can't trust the Mennonites, who can you trust? Yeah, it was. It was unsettling for your average person. And I mean, if we go into the product itself, it was disturbing to people that are products value no longer had to seem it leaves roughly on par with its market worth. If you have a bulb that somebody can mistake as an onion, although with that toxic substance, I don't know, probably not mistake it as an onion. Um, you have something that seems low value suddenly going for huge amounts. And scariest of all though, is that people could get rich through luck rather than work, which could potentially upset the social order, which was a very dangerous thing. Indeed. Right, So lots of scary new modern things kind of all jumbled up together there. And we sort of talked about this earlier, how we liked both versions of the story, both the revisionist history on how the valid trade failed and kind of the hysterical tale of vice story speculation that makes such a quaint and um, I guess interesting intro to stories on modern booms and bus Yeah. I like the story about a cow going for a toolip bulb. And it's obviously quite likely that economists will continue to debate whether this was really a bubble at all. I've seen all sorts of back and forth. Yes, it is a bubble, No it isn't. There were market explanations, yes, how could you not think it was a bubble? Everybody has an opinion, and I guess if they work it all out eventually though, when it turns out to not be a bubble, business writers are going to be out of a really tasty anecdote. Yeah, I mean it does make a good hook. Fort still use it, Maybe they I would still I would still read it. Yeah, definitely. And we just thought it would be appropriate to close with some current statistics about the Netherlands toolt production and maybe a note on the Dutch Republic too. I I didn't have all this straightened out, honestly, and I had to look into it some. The difference between the Dutch Republic, Holland and the Netherlands. UM. Why we have mentioned Holland so much rather than the Dutch Republic is because at the time the tulip trade took place mostly within Holland and its cities like Amsterdam and the Hague and Leiden and Harlem. Um. Today, though the Kingdom of the Netherlands makes up three parts, there's the Netherlands in Europe, which of course includes Holland and the Netherlands Antillies and Aruba, so all over the world. But a geography lesson for you. It's a little pop geography question and a little economics lesson to top it off. Um. Today the Netherlands still produces three billion bulbs a year, so it didn't completely wipe out the tulip trade, even if the story of the bubble is true. Fields cover half the country and the Dutch flower industry actually has sevent of international production of flowers and of the trade. So people take vacations just to to see the flowers blooming. They look lovely. I was like, can get the tourist website while I was doing some research on this. Pretty nice, very nice. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. One of our episodes on the show this week was a brief history of Gardening, and we mentioned in that episode that we have some other gardening adjacent topics in our back catalog. Several of them have been Saturday classics relatively recently, so we went way back, way back for this one. It is our February seven episode on tulip Mania, and this episode was from previous hosts of the show, Sarah and Dablina. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deleted chalk Reboarding, and we're going to start off today's episode with a little story, a legend, and it's about a merchant in seventeenth century Holland and he greets one of his ships just arrived from abroad, and he gives a sailor on board a herring for lunch, very generous of him. And the sailor is looking for a little something to eat with his harring, a little side dish, looking around the ship and he finds some root like vegetables on board and he thinks they're onions, so he cuts him up and he fries them with some oil and vinegar or some sort of condiments to to make them tasty, and he eats them with his fish, And through this sailor's innocent mistake, the merchant ends up losing more on the meal than he would have if he had bought the prince himself the finest feast in the land. Um. So you'll you've probably heard this story before, and you'll find it rehashed and retold in tons of sources and articles that you might read in your favorite business journal today. And it really epitomizes the financial bubble that shook the seven trade Dutch Republic, which, as the story goes, rich and poor people like speculated on tulip bulbs, and um, they were destroyed when ultimately the market dropped before the bulbs that even bloomed. And almost since then, this little tale not just the story of the bulbs mistake and its onions, but this greater story has been an anecdote for business writers to use as a cautionary tale as as something to watch out for. Don't get too crazy about get rich quick schemes, or you might find yourselves like the Dutch. Yeah, I know what you're eating. That's another aspect. It was another left them learned. And one reason you'll find that this Harrying Exotic onion side dish story and print so frequently is because it really makes a nice historical counterpart to current events. Um articles about the dot com bubble, housing bubble, even a tiny bubble of beanie babies that happened in the late nineties. So I'm proud I was not part of that bubble. Even I was probably a really at risk population to be part of it, but I avoided it. And yeah, it's just to give you an example though, of how often this story is used by business writers. UM. I found this particular version in The Economist, So, I mean, there you go kind of one of the ultimates there. Um, but we're gonna be talking about the tulip bubble or tulip mania, it's called lots of different things, and try to figure out why the bottom fell out, and also sort of throw a wrench in the mix here and talk about the revisionist history that's really changed the story a lot in the past year, or at least gotten a lot of people thinking. Um. But before we we go into the trade as a whole. We've got to discuss the history of the commodity itself. Tulips, which have a pretty pretty interesting history. Unless, say, for for a flower that you that looks like an onion, potentially us. They do, and writer Anna Pavard, who wrote just one of the surprisingly large number of books on tulips that have come out since, said that the tulip is a flower that has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual, and cultural baggage than any other on earth. So put that in your face. I know, I never knew what you think of it, um, but the tulip used to just be another wildflower. Of course, it didn't start with this history. It was one that grew in Turkey and Central Asia, and there are still more than one hundred species there today. I looked them up online. They're really pretty. They don't look that much like I mean, you can tell they're related, but they don't look that much like the tulips that you might grow in your garden today. They're they're sort of pointier and a little more open with like buttercups or something rather than Holland grown tulips. Sounds very nice with the Ottomans. They brought these bulbs into their courtyards and domestic hated them, and they were just obsessed, as the Dutch would become with these flowers. There. They liked the long, narrow flowers with the pointy petals, and they used them as a decorative motif and things like embroidery and tiles that even had a special vase for one blossom. But by the mid fifteen hundreds tulips were brought to Europe by Ogier jes Lan de Buzbek, the ambassador for Ferdinand the First of Austria to Suleiman the Magnificent. Yeah, and a little side note on this ambassador here. Um. We mentioned in the earlier episode on Cinderella of the Harem that Suleiman sort of started this tradition of not speaking to ambassadors presented at his court, and so we can imagine that Ogier jes Lan definitely suffered under this cold eye of Suleiman Um. At one point, actually he more than suffered. At one point the Sultan placed him under house arrest. He was eventually freed um. And when he does come back to Austria, he brought not only tulips, seeds, not tulip bulbs tulip seeds which take a really really long time to turn them into tulips. But he didn't just bring back those. He brought back lilacs and and gora goats too, which I guess that's why he didn't bring the bulbs. The goats probably took a lot of room. Yeah, they sound like they'd be pretty tough to transport. Holland, though, had to wait a few more years for tulips. But in fIF Careless Clusius, who was the prefect of the Imperial herb Gardens in Vienna, he brought some bulbs with him when he immigrated and headed up to a new botanical gardens in Leiden, So basically he was taking a new position and brought them along. Um Eclusius he bred these tulips mostly for medicinal purposes, but he considered them to be beautiful too, so dual purpose there well. And I have one more thing to add about the medicinal purposes. I'm not sure what these medicinal purposes were because I looked into it, and um tulips, especially their bulbs, are filled with glycosides which are extremely toxic and according to the Nova Scotia Museum. During World War two, Um, some starving Dutch cattle and people had to resort eating bulbs, and they would get quite sick from it. Um. So y'all should actually all thank Develina for making me go look up why Closius was using these for medicinal purposes before I like accidentally recommended that tulips made good medicine. And everybody ate the bulbs that they had just brought from pikes or something. Stick to your pharmacies, guys, that's our official recommendation. But luckily uh Clusius here, as I said, he uh, he also loved the bulbs for their beauty, and many other people did too. He really had a hard time preventing the bulbs from being stolen out of his garden. So the attraction begins. Yeah, it definitely begins with his garden. Um, and presumably it's from these stolen bulls and others hopefully purchased legitimately. Um, that a trade in tulips emerges, and the traders are called bloom Aston, which means tulip traders. It also kind of means tulip fanciers or tulip enthusiasts, which is something that you should keep in mind when we get into the speculative nature of this later story. Um, but yeah, I mean basically, the point is that these first traders love tulips to They're not just in it for the money. They're collectors. And this is a time when collecting things for your curio is really really popular. Um, when you would you'd add up seashells and and things like that, interesting rocks and minerals, um and display them, and it would show that you were uh educated, cultured person. So you had to have a love for um. And you also had to have some good faith to deal in tulips too. And here's why. Traditionally the trade, the tulip trade was done in the summer. Flowers bloomed in May or June, and after that the bulb was dug up and it was kept too dry indoors. The bulbs then had to be inspected and they were sold just before they were replanted in September, so the seller would deliver the bulb and the buyer would pay up. Yeah. So the issue here is pretty apparent. It's that if you're the buyer, you don't know exactly what you're getting. You don't know if it's the same ball that one that you contracted for. You don't know if it's the bulb that you saw bloom and it looks so pretty last spring, and you don't know if it's a bulb that's going to perform as well as the one you saw. I mean, there's already going to be a little uncertainty in any kind of horticultural pursuit. But there's the potential for deception here too, which made people pretty nervous. And to make matters worse, bulbs bought in the ground didn't always bloom as people expected them to, even if they were the same, even if there wasn't some sort of fraud happening. And that's partly because the most popular tulips at the time we're called broken tulips and um. If you if you look at an old water color or painting of tulips, you're probably looking at broken tulips. They have these feather flame petals um on a light background, so something like red or purple as stripe going up the middle of each petal, and the tulip would bloom like a normal solid color tulip one year, and then the next year it would bloom as this broken flower. Uh, like a total surprise to everyone, it seemed, and it's descendants, any any descendant from that bulb would also bloom splotched and broken. And so at the time people didn't know why this happened. It seemed like pure chance. But these were the tulips they wanted. Today we know that ironically, it's caused by a virus which is delivered by aphids. And because the broken tulips were I mean, I don't want to stay sick. They're not. They're not unable to to thrive in a certain sense, but they are a little bit weaker. Because they're weaker, the bulbs reproduced, they didn't reproduce as fast as a good, unaffected, healthy bulb should, and so it drove up the price. It made these broken flowers even more valuable and more desirable. And were you saying that, um, with the blotching us, the splotching us on the pedal, you couldn't tell how it would be splotched. Yeah, that was a chance too. So maybe it was some ugly splatch he didn't like, or maybe it was these perfect flames going up the middle of the pedal. Um, So you didn't know what you were going to get even if you were dealing with someone who was trustworthy. So the most expensive tool at the time was Semper Augustus, which was a red and white striped variety and it went for thousand florins, which was six times the annual income of an average person at that time. Yeah, but even as early as sixteen ten, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a single rare bulb made an acceptable dowry and an entire brewery. And I like I think the Encyclopedia mentioned specifically a thriving brewery in France was sold for one bulb, one highly coveted bulbs. So we see these examples of people getting pretty obsessed with tulips early on. But it was in sixteen thirty four sixteen thirty five, depending on which source you look at, that prices got really really high, and at that point business started to change and so instead of the system Dablina described a minute ago where the bulbs were sold in late summer when they were dug up, the bulbs were now sold by weight while they were still in the ground. Um, so this is fundamental changing the process of the tulip trade. Yeah, you may wonder how they could even pull this off. Well, what would happen is you'd get the details of the bulb, what its weight was planting, it's expected weight comes September, but that's it. There was no bold, so it was actual paper descriptions of the bulbs that were sold instead of the bulbs themselves. So you imagine like getting this piece of paper for something that you've paid money for. It's kind of um. I mean, imagine if you were buying tulips now for your garden and that was the deal you've got, you probably wouldn't be very happy with it. Um And to to deal with this new system, this um this selling by weight system TOOLIP bulbs even got their own unit of measure called the azen I think also called aces, where one of this unit equalled about zero point zero zero one eight ounces, so super super tiny units of measure as it would have to be. But for the Bloomston there was money to be made even if the price per oz and didn't change. As long as your bulbs grew in the ground, your profits were going to climb. So as demand continued to grow for these the offsets started to sell as well as mature bulbs, which means offsets were basically they were bull bull bets. Yeah, they were little bull bets. They took three to five years to produce flowers of their own, So pretty risky venture. Yeah, definitely more so than getting the pieces of paper instead of your actual bulb, because you're no longer even buying a bulb that well, yeah, I saw that bull bloom in May just this year. It's maybe fingers crossed little blue bloom in three to five years. Um, So a very risky business. And by sixty six there's a futures market to where buyers would contract to buy an in ground bulb at a set price, gambling that it would eventually, when it was finally dug up, it would be worth more than the expected value, and UM contracts themselves were bought and sold, and I think UM people who were a little skeptical of this whole market called the whole thing the wind trade, because you never knew which way the wind would blow UM, and you ultimately had to hope that there would be someone at the end who would pay up when those bulbs came out of the ground. That was what they were all gambling on. UM. To make matters worse, buyers start buying without the money, so they're buying on credit, and the sellers accept that because they're gambling on the fact that the buyer himself will probably be able to sell at a higher price eventually as well. Again all counting on that one person at the end of the chain who's willing to pay out, and the fact that the bulb actually turns out the way it's planned. A lot of bets going on here. So how high did this actually go? How much were people actually spending on these bulbs. Well, there's some information from seven floating around a nursery catalog actually from a Harlem florist, and it lists the name, weight and price of a tulip viceroy for example. There were lists of other tulips as well, but for this tulip viceroy, a lightweight bulb sold for three thousand guilders. A heavy bulb sold for four thousand, two hundred. So the low price here was twenty times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. Yeah, and I mean again, we we need to point out a few things. Even with this, we don't know if if this tulip bulb viceroy sold for this amount or if this is all part of the speculation, but it was the offering price um, and it's it really is kind of a I don't want to say unique, but um a rare statistic from this time of of a tulip bulbs name and its price and its weight all being put out there. We don't have that much information about it. Um. And this whole era is sort of filled with these legends. There's another really great one from this time which might even be utter known than that herring onion bulb beginning that we told him that the legend of the black Tulip, which ultimately inspired Alexander Dumas novel also called the Black tulip Um. This one, this one is starting to show that there's bad feelings in the tulip trade. It goes like this, There's a group of Harlem florists and they hear that a cobbler at the Hague has produced a black tulip, a rare coveted black tulip, and they go to him and they have a with him for a while, and they finally work out a deal. They buy it for one thousand and five hundred florins and as soon as it's theirs. They take it and they throw it on the ground and they stomp it to bits, and they tell him that he's a fool to have produced this black tulip and to have sold it to them for so little. They would have given him ten thousand florins if he had asked, And they tell him that he'll never ever be so lucky again to breathe this black tulip. And as the story goes, he's so distraught that he takes to bed and he dies. Of course that has to be the end to the moral fairy tale kind of black story. Yeah, but there's there's a lot of bitterness even if we even if we step away from this like obviously polemical story. Yeah, it was bitterness about the people who quite didn't understand the tulip thing or didn't thought it was kind of crazy, kind of out there, but probably like a lot of people now do. Um. For example, Harlem priest Theodicus Cats wrote to his nephew on February five, sixteen thirty seven, that like the plague that had been bad since sixty five, now quote another sickness had risen. It is the sickness of the bloom aston and Floriston. Also, historian Theodoras Trevilius wrote a much later. In sty eight, he wrote a letter that said, quote, I don't know what kind of angry spirit was called it from hell, but our descendants doubtless will laugh as a at the human insanity of our age that in our times the tulip flowers have been so revered. So yeah, a lot of self criticism even at the time, Um, like what are we doing spending all of this money and obsessing over tulips? So surprise, surprise, by February seven, the market collapses. Supposedly, as the traditional story goes, Um, it's because an expected buyer fails to show up and the whole market loses confidence. But more likely it's just that people started to realize around this time that the paper chain of buying and trading these these little descriptions of tulips that are in the ground, would only work and they would only make their profit if there was a buyer at the end, as we mentioned before. So yeah, like if I bought a tulip from you to Blina and I was trying to make money off of it, I would know that I had to get our producer, Jerry to buy the bulb ultimately, because if she didn't buy it, then I'd be left with the toolip bulb and trying to decide if I even wanted to pay you for it, so it might all end up on your lap. No way, cracking skulls at that point. Um. So the sellers want their money, but there's really no way to enforce these oral agreements. Um. As Sarah mentioned, they probably weren't as violent as I just was. Um. By March or so, it suggested that all trades since the previous September be nullified. But at that point the High Court steps in. They say, basically, deal with it. We don't want to deal with it. What they say is all transactions remain in force, but deal with it yourself. Don't come to us about it, essentially, And so I mean, just one example of how people tried to deal with it, there was a self established commission of tradesmen set up in Harlem and they decided that the contracts there would be settled for three point five percent of the purchase price. And of course nobody is happy this. It's a lose lose situation for everyone. If you are left with the bulb, you are expecting a lot more for that, and you know, presumably you've been making some bets yourself. If you're stuck paying three point five percent of the purchase price, you're just throwing away money essentially. So at this point the story gets kind of mythic again, and you know, it's kind of like the black tulip. So supposedly the bubble bust just shakes the Dutch economy to a tremendous extent because the investment is so widespread up their speculators across classes, so bankruptcy is common and um people lose their houses and their businesses for tulips, and it becomes the classic cautionary tale of being a little more careful with your money, and sort of the poster boy for it is Jan van Goyen, who was an artist and supposedly died in debt because of tulips. Well we'll find out a little bit more about that lately later. He did die in debt, but not necessarily because of his tulip speculation. So, needless to say, it's painted as a pretty dire situation, and it's easy to see how it was used as a cautionary tale recently, though there's been a little bit of a shift in how some people look at the tulip bubble. For example, writer and gold Girl suggested in two thousand sevens tulip Mania, Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age that the idea that the tulip Mania was economically devastating to Holland is the result of a few contemporary polemical pamphlets which were written to basically make people more prudent in their own business affairs. These, in turn, she suggests, we're taken up by historians and gradually filtered into fact. So yeah, and and sort of to add to that, because because this story has so frequently been used as an anecdote, it sort of took on a sheen of current bubble comparison. So if you're if you're writing about the south Sea bubble, or if you're writing about housing housing today, yeah, it takes on a little bit of whatever you're comparing it to. And in a review for Reviews in History, j Leslie Price wrote that the book was quote determinedly revisionists. So, I mean, I really think this this book kind of shook up the tulip story. But um, to add to that, recently, a lot of economists have debated whether it was a bubble at all, and and there are precise economic definitions for for what that means that we're not going to get into. But um, it seems to be like maybe a fun exercise for economists or or perhaps the serious study um to figure out if there was a bubble and then to debate either for or against it. Yes, there was a bubb will know there were market reasons behind it. Um, it's it's created a whole whole new topic of discussion for these tulips. Yeah. And similarly, I think looking at gold Girl's argument is kind of a fun exercise for historians as well, because she's just sort of searching for the source that this tale came from in the first place. Definitely, I always I always like when I get a surprise like this in an episode. I mean, I'm always relieved that I found this update to the story. It terrifies me that I won't someday. But um, it's it's fun for us for sure. Yeah. So just a little bit on Goldger's argument. Most of her revision, so to speak, come at the sake of traditional tulip sources or the canon. You might say yeah, um. And a lot of our traditional sources on tulipmania come from Charles McKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which was published in eighteen forty one. It's a pretty popular book. It's actually still in print. I looked it up, you could, you could order it um, and it paints a lot of these really exciting stories about the bubble, like the mistaken onions and things like oxen cheese and clothes being traded for one vice. Roy bulb Um the really picturesque accounts of the story. But as gold Guard and Covered it turned out, Charles McKay's main source was Johann Backman, who wrote a history of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins in and Beckman is an interesting character because he seems to be one of the first major people who projected his contemporary concerns onto the Dutch bubble, so economic concerns for his time. Um. And he may have also been the guy who gave us the idea that the bubble burst because the bloomist and became pure speculators. They weren't just collectors anymore. And he seemed to view this almost as as expected that, well, surely you wouldn't just be tulip fanciers and spend these huge amounts of money. But he wrote, quote, how ridiculous would it have been to purchase useless roots with their weight in gold? If the possession of the flower had been the only object? Pretty I guess he did, wasn't in a tulips? Apparently not? So he his argument kind of relies on Abraham Munting, a botanical writer from the seventeenth century whose father lost money on tulips. But since Munting was too young to be their firstand his sources also came from somewhere else, So his sources came from a chronicle or named Luva von Night Seema in sixteen sixty nine, and also a propaganda piece by Audrey and Roman from sixteen thirty seven. So I Seema was also drawing from sources from pamphlets. And we're left at this point with pamphlets as like the basis the main source for all of this stuff. When we filter it all down, when you filter it all down to the bottom, that's what you get. And so of course the pamphlets are gonna be anti speculation, They're going to be encouraging people to not go out and blow all their money on tulips. But it's interesting because Goldgert also takes a closer look at a few of the most famous Mania anecdotes and assumptions. For instance, the artists I mentioned earlier who died in debt. For example, he did die in debt, but it was much later in sixteen fifty six, perhaps in debt for yet another speculative scheme, but not tulips. And another issue that Goldgirl addresses is the idea that the bubble had such a tremendously broad effect on the economy because so many people were involved, rich people, poor people, people in between. Instead, she argues that the bloom Aston were this really tight knit group of people who worked together for years and years and years. Most of them loved collecting tulips as well as trading them, and they would meet in inns and dispute tulip, you know, have tulip talk with each other and dispute and exchange and trade. And so certain members of the Bloomaston were obviously severely shaken by the crash, but their numbers were smaller than often thought. And of course, even if you were a speculator, you didn't get into too much trouble if you were in the middle of that chain, because hopefully things would cancel, cancel, other things out, other debts and credits. Um. So just sort of suggesting that maybe there was a smaller pool of people affected by this crisis. Yeah, the entirety of Holland wasn't devastated because of this, uh, the tulip bubble. Yeah, but gold Girl also suggests that the bubble was indeed a social and cultural crisis, so she doesn't deny that in her book at all. Yeah, a real value shock for the people of the country. And in the exteen thirties, the Dutch Republic was in boom times. It was really good period, and capitalism was sort of taking off, but didn't quite sit right with everybody yet, and the bubble scared people for a few reasons, apparently enough to make them right some of these very angry concerned pamphlets. So a few of those scary things, I mean, the main one is that buyers were nagged after prices fell. Nobody likes to see that. That's a that's a bad sign for business. And then there was the fact that the sellers basically had no recourse to get their money back. Um, this one is interesting, Um, the menon Nights. This was one of the reasons is that the Mennonites, who refused to swear oaths and were considered very trustworthy, they were also involved in the tulip trade and that act of broken promises, and so it was sort of like, if you can't trust the Mennonites, who can you trust? Yeah, it was. It was unsettling for your average person. And I mean, if we go into the product itself, it was disturbing to people that are products value no longer had to seem it leaves roughly on par with its market worth. If you have a bulb that somebody can mistake as an onion, although with that toxic substance, I don't know, probably not mistake it as an onion. Um, you have something that seems low value suddenly going for huge amounts. And scariest of all though, is that people could get rich through luck rather than work, which could potentially upset the social order, which was a very dangerous thing. Indeed. Right, So lots of scary new modern things kind of all jumbled up together there. And we sort of talked about this earlier, how we liked both versions of the story, both the revisionist history on how the valid trade failed and kind of the hysterical tale of vice story speculation that makes such a quaint and um, I guess interesting intro to stories on modern booms and bus Yeah. I like the story about a cow going for a toolip bulb. And it's obviously quite likely that economists will continue to debate whether this was really a bubble at all. I've seen all sorts of back and forth. Yes, it is a bubble, No it isn't. There were market explanations, yes, how could you not think it was a bubble? Everybody has an opinion, and I guess if they work it all out eventually though, when it turns out to not be a bubble, business writers are going to be out of a really tasty anecdote. Yeah, I mean it does make a good hook. Fort still use it, Maybe they I would still I would still read it. Yeah, definitely. And we just thought it would be appropriate to close with some current statistics about the Netherlands toolt production and maybe a note on the Dutch Republic too. I I didn't have all this straightened out, honestly, and I had to look into it some. The difference between the Dutch Republic, Holland and the Netherlands. UM. Why we have mentioned Holland so much rather than the Dutch Republic is because at the time the tulip trade took place mostly within Holland and its cities like Amsterdam and the Hague and Leiden and Harlem. Um. Today, though the Kingdom of the Netherlands makes up three parts, there's the Netherlands in Europe, which of course includes Holland and the Netherlands Antillies and Aruba, so all over the world. But a geography lesson for you. It's a little pop geography question and a little economics lesson to top it off. Um. Today the Netherlands still produces three billion bulbs a year, so it didn't completely wipe out the tulip trade, even if the story of the bubble is true. Fields cover half the country and the Dutch flower industry actually has sevent of international production of flowers and of the trade. So people take vacations just to to see the flowers blooming. They look lovely. I was like, can get the tourist website while I was doing some research on this. Pretty nice, very nice. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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