May 22, 2021 • 34 mins
This 2011 episode is from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina. During the 17th century, the Dutch went nuts for tulips, paying exorbitant amounts for a single bulb. But what exactly triggered this commodity bubble? And what do revisionist historians have to say?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
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
(00:24):
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.
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:32):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:00):
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,
(03:21):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:05):
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
(04:28):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:33):
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.
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
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.
(06:38):
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
(07:02):
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
(07:25):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:09):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:13):
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,
(09:35):
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
(09:58):
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
(10:20):
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.
(10:43):
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
(11:05):
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,
(11:26):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:37):
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
(12:59):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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
(14:04):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:51):
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.
(16:13):
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
(16:36):
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
(16:57):
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,
(17:20):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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
(18:24):
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.
(18:48):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:32):
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,
(19:55):
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
(20:15):
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
(20:36):
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.
(20:57):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:43):
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,
(22:05):
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
(22:27):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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
(24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:45):
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,
(26:08):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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,
(28:21):
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
(28:44):
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,
(29:05):
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
(29:29):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:38):
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
(30:59):
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
(31:19):
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
(31:39):
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,
(32:00):
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
(32:22):
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
(32:43):
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.
(33:12):
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
(33:33):
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,
(33:55):
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
(00:24):
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.
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:32):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:40):
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
(03:00):
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,
(03:21):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:05):
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
(04:28):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:10):
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
(05:33):
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.
(05:55):
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
(06:17):
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.
(06:38):
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
(07:02):
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
(07:25):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:09):
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
(08:32):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:13):
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,
(09:35):
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
(09:58):
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
(10:20):
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.
(10:43):
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
(11:05):
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,
(11:26):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:37):
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
(12:59):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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
(14:04):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:47):
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
(15:08):
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
(15:29):
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
(15:51):
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.
(16:13):
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
(16:36):
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
(16:57):
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,
(17:20):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:02):
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
(18:24):
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.
(18:48):
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
(19:09):
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
(19:32):
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,
(19:55):
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
(20:15):
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
(20:36):
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.
(20:57):
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
(21:21):
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
(21:43):
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,
(22:05):
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
(22:27):
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
(22:47):
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
(23:09):
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
(23:30):
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
(23:53):
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
(24:15):
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
(24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:45):
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,
(26:08):
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
(26:28):
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
(26:52):
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
(27:12):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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,
(28:21):
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
(28:44):
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,
(29:05):
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
(29:29):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:38):
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
(30:59):
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
(31:19):
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
(31:39):
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,
(32:00):
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
(32:22):
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
(32:43):
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.
(33:12):
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
(33:33):
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,
(33:55):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
Today’s Latest News In 4 Minutes. Updated Hourly.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.