In 1637 the Dutch supposedly went so mad for tulip bulbs that one rare Semper Augustus traded for the price of an Amsterdam mansion — before the whole market collapsed overnight and ruined a nation. It's the founding parable of every bubble since. The twist: dig into the archives and most of the famous story turns out to be a moralizing myth.
The baseline: prices for tulip futures spiking through 1634–36 and crashing in February 1637, generally cited as the first recorded speculative bubble in history.
History Scope sets the scene of the Dutch Golden Age — how a beautiful, virus-streaked flower became the most sought-after luxury object in Europe.
Extra History's animated telling of the frenzy: the taverns turned into trading floors, the futures contracts, and the psychology of a market feeding on itself.
HISTORY on what genuinely happened in the winter of 1637 — the defaults, the canceled contracts, and the social tensions that followed the collapse.
A concise explainer connecting the tulip frenzy to the anatomy of every bubble that followed — irrational exuberance, greater fools, and the crash that always comes.
Smithsonian's myth-busting: historian Anne Goldgar's archival work shows the ruined-economy story is largely a 19th-century moral fable, not history.
How Charles Mackay's 1841 bestseller invented the popular legend — and why almost none of its most dramatic anecdotes survive contact with the records.
A curated gateway into the primary sources and serious economic scholarship, placing tulip mania alongside the later manias it supposedly foretold.