Tulip Fever 

The tulip was not Dutch. It arrived in western Europe from the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century, and the botanist Carolus Clusius planted bulbs at Leiden in the 1590s. It was strange, it was hard to propagate quickly, and it flowered for about a week a year. Every ingredient of a speculative object was already present: scarcity, status, and a slow supply response.

The most valuable bulbs were the broken ones, streaked with flames of white against red or purple. Nobody at the time knew why some bulbs broke and others did not. The cause, identified only in the twentieth century, was a mosaic virus spread by aphids, which also weakened the plant. The market's most prized asset was a sick flower that reproduced badly.

Because bulbs sit in the ground from summer to spring, buyers and sellers began trading paper claims on bulbs they could not see, in taverns, through informal syndicates known as colleges, settled with wine and a small commission. That is a futures market with no exchange, no clearing house and no enforcement. Prices for rare bulbs climbed through late 1636 into the winter.

In the first week of February 1637 an auction at Haarlem failed to attract bids, and the whole price structure went with it. The honest version of the aftermath, which is what this collection teaches, is that the economic damage was narrow: relatively few traders, mostly settled by negotiation at a fraction of contract value. The lasting damage was to the story we tell, because ever since, every boom gets measured against a flower.