Who actually went broke 

The legend is specific about consequences. Fortunes destroyed, merchants bankrupted, suicides in the canals, the Dutch economy knocked flat. It is a satisfying ending, and the archival record does not support it.

The most thorough modern investigation is Anne Goldgar's, published as Tulipmania in 2007, based on years in Dutch notarial and court archives tracing the actual participants. Her findings reframe the episode. The number of people trading at serious prices was modest, in the hundreds rather than the multitudes, concentrated among merchants, skilled artisans and connoisseurs who were often connected by trade, religion or family. She found no evidence of bankruptcies caused by tulip losses, and no documented suicides.

The mechanics explain much of it. Because contracts were forward agreements with little or no money down, the collapse mostly cancelled expected gains rather than removing existing wealth. Sellers who had promised to deliver in the summer never received payment, and buyers who had promised to pay mostly never did. When the courts of Holland declined to enforce the notes and referred disputes back to local settlement, the effective outcome was that obligations were discharged for a small percentage of face value, with Haarlem's 1638 arrangement often cited near three and a half percent.

This does not mean nobody was hurt. Growers who had committed to expensive stock, and dealers who had bought bulbs with real money intending to sell them on, took genuine losses. Some individuals were left in long, bitter litigation. And the wider macroeconomic picture is clear: Dutch trade, shipping, the East India Company and the property market show no sign of a shock in 1637. The Republic's golden age continued for decades.

Goldgar's larger argument is that the real damage was social. These trades depended on trust, on a signature between people who moved in the same circles, and when hundreds of promises turned out to be unenforceable, the injury was to the credibility of a person's word. In a commercial society built on exactly that, an insult of that kind was felt keenly, and it explains the moral heat of the pamphlets far better than any account of lost fortunes.

That is why the episode is worth teaching accurately rather than colourfully. Tulip mania is the standard reference point for every subsequent bubble, and the version most people carry, of a nation crazed and then bankrupted by flowers, has the causation wrong. A market can inflate and deflate spectacularly while doing very little economic damage, provided the leverage sits outside the banking system and the losses fall on expectations rather than balance sheets.

So if the ruin never happened, where did the story of mass ruin come from?