Tulipomania (30 page)
Authors: Mike Dash
Ch’ang-ch’un is in northern China, just north of the fortieth parallel and only two thousand miles from the valleys of the Tien Shan. The mania virus had come home at last.
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Even the most common and mundane objects can become rare and costly in certain circumstances. During the Second World War, when military supplies naturally took priority, U.S. servicemen would go to great lengths to obtain bottles of Coca-Cola. On one occasion a single bottle of the drink, worth five cents, was auctioned on the Italian front for $4,000.
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The equivalent of about $18,000 today.
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It would be wrong to see the Dutch tulip mania as unique. Similar booms—by which economists mean exceptionally rapid rises in prices—and bubbles (booms in which a commodity’s price quite outstrips what it is actually worth to anyone other than a speculator) have occurred all over the world throughout the last four hundred years. The objects of speculation vary from the obvious—stocks and shares, land and oil—to the unusual. In the United Provinces themselves there was a boom in investment in the passenger canal system begun in 1630—a genuinely useful development in the transport system that made many men rich— and during the 1670s a bubble involving the erection of elaborate public clocks.
Of all bubbles, however, the one that perhaps resembles the tulip mania most closely was the Florida land boom of 1925. Like the tulip, Florida was exotic, and before 1925 the state was difficult to get to and both unhealthy and swampy. Gradually, however, the construction of new roads and railroads and the draining of the swampland, together with the guarantee of fine winter weather, made it more attractive, and some rich Americans invested in vacation homes in the Miami area. Poorer people were attracted by their example, and local real estate agents were quick to exploit the rising demand for property.
Stories began to circulate concerning the fantastic profits that could be made by buying and selling land in Florida. The famous lawyer William Jennings Bryan bought a winter home in Miami in 1912 and sold it in 1920 for a profit of $250,000. Later on lots purchased for $1,200 could be resold a few months later for $5,000. A lot purchased for $2,500 was resold for $7,800, then $10,000, $17,500, and finally $35,000—the last purchaser being the man who had sold it for $2,500 and had lived to regret doing so. At Snapper Creek Canal land worth $15 an acre in 1913 sold for $2,000 an acre in 1925, and in central Miami land once worth $30 per acre became worth $75,000. Eventually land in Miami became more valuable than property on Fifth Avenue in New York. Much of it was bought on payment of a small deposit by speculators who planned to resell it before their next payments became due.
Money poured into the state. In a twelve-month period beginning in the autumn of 1924, bank clearings in Miami rose from $212,000 to over $1 million, and land transfers tripled. An edition of the
Miami Daily News
published in the summer of 1925 ran to 504 pages, almost all of it real estate advertising—a world record at the time. It was said there were two thousand estate agents in Miami alone, employing 25,000 salespeople.
The crash came in the autumn, as crashes often do. Speculators had badly overestimated the real demand for land. The number of winter visitors to the state was only a tenth of what had been predicted. People began to default on their loans, and a man who had sold land for $12 an acre and seen successive purchasers pay $17, $30, and $60 an acre was dismayed to discover that all had failed to pay more than their initial deposit, leaving the land to revert to him. From the summer of 1926 the crisis had caused several Florida banks to fail as clearings fell from $1 billion in 1925 to $633 million a year later and eventually to a mere $143 million in 1928. In the latter year,
The Nation
wrote, “Miami will be the cheapest place in the United States to live…. One of the most pretentious buildings on the beach, whose monthly rate was $250, now rents for $35.”
OTES
General
A surprisingly large amount is known about the history of the tulip, which enjoyed the good fortune both of being highly regarded and of flourishing when garden writing was at its early apogee. As well as good early summaries such as Sir Daniel Hall’s
The Book of the Tulip
(London: Martin Hopkinson, 1929), several scarce but excellent regional studies have appeared, notably Michiel Roding and Hans Theunissen’s
The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations
(Utrecht & Istanbul: Turco-Dutch Friendship Association, 1993) and Sam Segal’s pamphlet
Tulips Portrayed: The Tulip Trade in Holland in the Seventeenth Century
(Lisse: Museum voor de Bloembollenstreek, 1992). The most comprehensive general account, however, is undoubtedly Anna Pavord’s
The Tulip
(London: Bloomsbury, 1998).
Those interested in the history of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century are also richly catered to, most recently by the publication of Jonathan Israel’s highly acclaimed overview
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Social historians have Simon Schama’s rather more controversial
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(London: Fontana, 1991) and A. T. van Deursen’s comprehensive
Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth Century Holland
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
The history of the tulip mania itself, however, remains remarkably obscure, and even now it has never been the subject of an exhaustive scholarly inquiry that makes full use of the mass of raw material available in Dutch archives. Many of the short accounts of the subject are based on badly flawed popular studies, most notably Charles Mackay’s entertaining but misleading
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), which remains in print today despite having originally appeared in 1841. (Much more reliable, though still dependent on secondary sources, is the fairly extensive modern reanalysis by Joseph Bulgatz, published in
Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars and More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
[New York: Harmony, 1992], which has, however, attracted very little attention.)
Apart from contemporary pamphlets, collected by E. H. Krelage in
De Pamfletten van den Tulpenwindhandel 1636–1637
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1942), the most valuable Dutch sources are the solicitors’ acts, which still exist for most of the cities caught up in the mania and record not only some of the (comparatively rare) legal agreements for the purchase of tulip bulbs but also the proceedings brought as a result of the collapse of prices in 1637. The extracts that have appeared—most notably those collated by A. van Damme,
Aanteekeningen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Bloembollen: Haarlem, 1899–1903
(a collection of turn-of-the-century journal articles finally collected and published at Leiden by Boerhaave, 1976) and Nicolaas Posthumus, who published both pamphlets and some contemporary source material in “Die Speculatie in Tulpen in de Jaren 1636 en 1637,” parts 1–3, in
Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek
12 (1926), pp. 3–19; 13 (1927), pp. 1–85; 18 (1934), pp. 229–40, are in no way comprehensive; van Damme even states that the acts he published were chance discoveries rather than the products of systematic research.
By far the most exhaustive account of the period remains Krelage’s monumental
Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland: De Tulpomanie van 1636–37 en de Hyacintenhandel 1720–36
(Amsterdam, 1942), upon which a good portion of the present book is based. It is, however, now in some respects outdated. My general feeling, after reviewing the available material, is that even after sounding the necessary notes of caution about the reliability of the popular accounts, historians and particularly economists remain guilty of exaggerating the real importance and extent of the tulip mania.
The following notes abbreviate authors and titles of works cited; for full information, please refer to the Bibliography.
The principal source of information on events in Alkmaar in February 1637 is A. van Damme,
Aanteekeningen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Bloembollen: Haarlem, 1899–1903
(Leiden: Boerhaave, 1976). On the appearance and behavior of Dutch tulip traders, see both Zumthor,
Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), and the more recent and more analytical A. T. van Deursen,
Plain Lives in a Golden Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Value of a tulip
Garber, “Tulipmania,” p. 537n, states that in 1637 each guilder contained 0.856g of gold. One gram of gold was thus worth 1.17 guilders. A Viceroy bulb sold at auction in Alkmaar on February 5 fetched 146 guilders per gram, making it worth 125 times its weight in gold.
Richest man
Israel,
Dutch Republic
, p. 348.
Tulip fortunes
Garber, “Tulipmania,” p. 550.
The early history of the tulip is very largely obscure. Its Asian origins are discussed by Turhan Baytop, “The Tulip in Istanbul During the Ottoman Period,” in Michiel Roding and Hans Theunissen, eds.,
The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations
(Utrecht & Istanbul: Turco-Dutch Friendship Association, 1993), and the enthusiasm for wild tulips in Persia rather briefly by Wilfrid Blunt,
Tulipomania
(London: Penguin, 1950).
Asian origins of the tulip
Baytop, “Tulip in Istanbul,” pp. 50–56.
Early appreciation of tulips
Certainly the Hittites, who dominated much of Asia Minor two thousand years before the birth of Christ, already appreciated the beauty of wild bulbous flowers. Ancient inscriptions record that the advent of spring was marked each year in the Hittite realm by a celebration called the An.tah.sum-sar, which may be translated as “bulb festival”
and which appears to have coincided with the first flowering of the crocus. (Today many Anatolians still celebrate a similar festival, called Hidrellez, each May, during which they go on picnics and eat a couscous of bulgur wheat and mashed crocus bulbs.) The flowering of tulips may have held a similar significance for peoples of the steppe, who experienced winters harsher than anything encountered in the crocus country of Asia Minor, and among whom the arrival of spring must have been at least as eagerly anticipated. See Baytop, “Tulip in Istanbul,” p. 51.
The tulip in Persia
Hall,
Book of the Tulip
, p. 44; Blunt,
Tulipomania
, pp. 22–23; Schloredt,
Treasury of Tulips
, p. 62.
History of the Turks
The Ottoman portion of the tulip’s story is much better documented than its very early history. An accessible summary of Turkish history in this period is Inalcik,
Ottoman Empire
.
The tulip in Ottoman history to 1453
Demiriz, “Tulips in Ottoman Turkish Culture and Art,” pp. 57–75.
The story of Hasan Efendi
Ibid., p. 57.
Babur and the Turkish gardening tradition
Pallis,
In the Days of the Janissaries
, p. 198.
The tulip as a religious symbol
The Turks were not the only people to regard the flower as a religious symbol. Among the Pennsylvania Dutch—German immigrants who traveled to the east coast of America from the seventeenth century—stylized three-petal tulips were used as a motif that symbolized the Holy Trinity. They were often used to adorn important papers such as birth certificates. See Schloredt,
Treasury of Tulips
, p. 43.
Horticulture is hardly central to the history of the Ottoman Empire, and it features scarcely at all in conventional histories. The best guides to the story of the tulip’s time in Turkey have been accounts of Istanbul. The best of these is certainly Philip Mansel,
Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924
(London: John Murray, 1995). For the Ottoman palaces, the indispensable source is Barnette Miller,
Beyond the Sublime Porte: The Grand Seraglio of Stambul
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931). Dr. Miller was probably the first Westerner to gain access to the inner courtyards of the Topkapi, and
she did so at a time, early in the twentieth century, when they still looked much as they had in earlier times. She worked hard to reconstruct those institutions—such as the harem and the gardens—that had fallen into disuse or disrepair, and her work has formed the basis for all subsequent descriptions of Ottoman palace life.
Battle of Kosovo
Malcolm,
Kosovo
, pp. 58–80. For the chronicler, see Pavord,
Tulip
, p. 31.
Bayezid’s shirt
There is some dispute about the age of this garment. The Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts dates it to about 1400, but Demiriz, “Tulips in Ottoman Turkish Culture and Art,” p. 71, suggests that the style dates the shirt to about 1550. The tradition therefore remains unproven—but even if Demiriz is right, it is certainly not impossible that Bayezid wore a similar shirt.
