A flower worth a canal house 

Every account of tulip mania quotes a number. A single bulb for thousands of guilders. A bulb traded for a house. The numbers are real in the sense that documents record them, but a guilder figure with no yardstick is decoration rather than information, so here is the yardstick.

In the Dutch Republic of the 1630s a skilled craftsman, a carpenter or a master mason, might earn somewhere in the region of 250 to 350 guilders in a year. A schoolmaster earned less. A good house on a lesser Amsterdam canal ran into the low thousands, and the grand houses on the Herengracht cost considerably more. Rembrandt bought his large house on the Sint Antoniesbreestraat in 1639 for 13,000 guilders, a sum that helped ruin him later.

Against that scale, the peak tulip prices are startling. Contracts from the winter of 1636 and 1637 record sums in the high hundreds and the thousands for single bulbs of the most fashionable named varieties. A famous sale of Viceroy bulbs was set against a list of goods, wheat, rye, oxen, pigs, sheep, wine, beer, butter, cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver cup, adding up to a few thousand guilders. Several years of a craftsman's earnings for something that would be underground most of the year.

Two cautions belong here, and the historian Anne Goldgar's archival work supplies both. First, the spectacular figures are the top of the market, and a small top at that. A modest number of very wealthy connoisseurs and dealers were trading rare named bulbs at those levels, while a much larger and cheaper trade in ordinary bulbs sold by weight ran underneath it. Quoting only the peaks describes the market about as well as one auction record describes the art trade.

Second, and more important, a contract price is not money that changed hands. These were forward agreements to pay on delivery in the summer, often between people who knew each other, frequently signed with no deposit. When the market broke, most of those obligations were renegotiated or simply abandoned. The headline number is what someone promised, not what someone lost.

That distinction is the difference between the legend and the record, and it survives into modern markets almost unchanged. Peak valuations circulate as facts because they are memorable, while the settlement details, which decide who is actually hurt, sit in documents nobody quotes.

To see why so little cash moved, you have to look at where the trading happened, and it was not an exchange.