Six friends gather around a patch of dirt in the Netherlands. 

Cornelis, Dirk, Symon, Reynier, Other Cornelis and Andries (clearly this is not 2022). 

They’re digging up something that is meant to be worth 30 guilders. That is, the price of a pretty modest house back in 1637.

A whole house worth of value in a small buried item.

Gold? Gemstones? An incredibly well bred and fanciful horse?  

No dear reader, it was nothing of the sort.

It was in fact, a single tulip bulb.

You may have heard the story of tulip mania in the Netherlands. How an entire country goes mad over a single flower. And how it all collapses in a matter of days. But almost all of the popular history around this time is erroneous - an oversimplification. A bit like judging the 90s on just Blink 182 albums.

There is a much deeper story here.

First, the setting. We jump back to 1585, when the Netherlands gained independence from the Spanish empire, kicking off a century of explosive economic growth.

While the rest of Europe was slumming it through a period known as the ’General Crisis’, the Dutch became a dominant trade power and got very rich.

During this time Jehan Somer, the son of a magistrate, took two years off to go backpacking (ok, luxury touring back then). During his time away he visits Constantinople. Recently taken over by the Ottoman Turkish empire, Constantinople at that time was nice. Impressive gardens with very impressive flowers.

Somer returned to the Netherlands with a bug for flowers. He showed his buddies back home all the sweet flowers he’d found. Dogtooth violets, auricles, double narcissi, lilies, crocuses and tulips.

But tulips? Well, tulips were special.

Join us as we make this journey through the Netherlands in the 17th century and how this story has so many parallels with our modern-day manias. We dive down beyond the simplistic takes and ask what happened, what caused it and what it says about today.

Sources 

• Anne Goldgar: Tulip mania: the classic story of a Dutch financial bubble is mostly wrong
• Charles Mackay: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
• Bloomeffects: The history of eating tulips 
• Tulipmania Art Journal: The most expensive tulip bulb in history costed as much as the finest house on the most fashionable Amsterdam canal
• Wikipedia: Economic history of the Netherlands
• I don’t care about your crypto, boy