Tulipmania is unique as a story about gardening that speaks to the world. We love its saga of connoisseurship turned to avarice, of culture become cult, of fiscal prudence thrown away in a frenzy of speculation. We thrill to hear how in the 1630s a single bulb of the tulip cultivar ‘Viceroy’ was exchanged for a whole estate’s worth of goods that included 12 sheep, a silver cup and 1,000lb of cheese.
And tulipmania is such a template for contemporary anxieties. There are timely warnings of the consequences of treating Nature with hubris — the very agent producing the most valuable tulip varieties was a degenerative virus, unknown to the Dutch, which in time would also play their executioner. Tulipmania gives us a doomsday scenario for the capitalist dream, a nation of burghers suddenly able to join in the new shareholders’ free-for-all — and losing their values and valuables into the bargain.
Then there is the infamous “wind trade”, the prototype futures market that sprang up to feed the investors’ worst excesses — chaps sitting in pubs betting the farm on bulbs that would never see soil, staking the lot on a jazzy prospectus and a greed-tickling promise. Finally, the bubble bursts in a deluge of insolvencies that drowns one of the world’s most dynamic economies.
All life is there — little wonder that Alexandre Dumas, J. K. Galbraith, Simon Schama, Anna Pavord, Deborah Moggach, Mike Dash and, soon, Steven Spielberg have each in their different ways served up the romance and lunacy of tulipmania. How strange it would be if it turned out never to have happened, if we found that the single most sacred episode in horticultural history was no more than a wishful confabulation like Athenian democracy or Merrie England. Well, I ’m afraid that just as the new tulipmania bubble looks so gloriously inflated, that is exactly what is happening. Some scholarly killjoys have turned up to prick it.
There is a Chinese whispers quality about the sources for the tulipmania story. The most commonly used source is neither contemporary nor primary. It was written two centuries after these events were supposed to have taken place. Yet the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay’s chapter on “The Tulipomania” in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841/1852) has slipped more or less unchallenged into the collective consciousness, establishing itself as the standard account of the craze. It is here that you will find the ‘Viceroy’ tulip story and many others.
But what Mackay chose to report as fact was no more than antique spin. These stories were worst-case inventions, satirical vignettes put about by Dutch government propaganda aimed at discouraging speculation in tulips. Not only did the most celebrated examples of mania never happen, it now seems the anti-tulip campaign was itself a success.
There is no doubt that the Dutch were passionate about tulips in the 1600s, prized them highly and the prices they fetched were very high — one bulb of the most valuable cultivar could realise the equivalent value of a decent townhouse. But there are numerous instances of plants achieving far higher prices elsewhere at other times, including, in 19th-century England, orchids and even the tulip itself. Horticulture sets a premium on novelty and rarity: some new varieties are still valued in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. This in itself begins to erode the idea that the love-and-money aspect of tulipmania was unique. But what about the infamous bubble: how real was that?
The answer comes not from an historian or horticulturist but an economist, Peter Garber, head of global strategy at Deutsche Bank. In Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (MIT Press, 2001), Professor Garber rewrites history by looking at the bottom line. He amasses primary evidence relating to Dutch tulip markets in the 1630s including price lists, contracts and court reports, crunches the numbers, examines the social context and deflates the hyperbole.
The most lurid tales of tulipmania “stem mainly from a single source resulting from a moralistic campaign of the Dutch Government”, which had its own views on where investors’ money should go. At its wildest, speculation in bulbs “was a phenomenon lasting one month in the dreary Dutch winter of 1637 . . . and was of no real consequence”. There were few bankruptcies and a swift recovery. Contrast Charles Mackay’s observation that “ substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption”, with Garber’s cool conclusion that “little economic distress was associated with the end of the tulipmania”.
For romantics and catastrophists the news is dispiriting, but all is not lost; the tulipmania myth is a beautiful and useful artefact, a tale of dazzling ingenuity. And one that can be said to have made history — most directly in the case of the black tulip. When Mackay speculates in his book that if a tulip could be found “black as the black swan of Juvenal, its price would equal that of a dozen acres of standing corn”, he was talking about tulips in the 1840s, not the 1630s when there is no evidence of the black tulip being particularly desirable. Back then, the ideal was a “broken” cultivar such as ‘Semper Augustus’, snowy white and streaked with scarlet.
But two centuries after tulipmania and eight years after Mackay’s account, Alexandre Dumas either didn’t know or scruple about such niceties. The Black Tulip (1850) takes its cue from Mackay’s pipe-dream, building a pastiche 17th-century edifice on a casual 19th-century aside. Like so much else in the novel, its focus, the competition run by the Tulip Society of Haarlem offering 100,000 guilders for the first true black bloom, was a fiction.
The effect of this literary conceit has been to rewrite history. Spend a few minutes online, or dip into some respectable books on the subject, and you will find tales of how in the 1620s a group of Dutch florists travelled from Haarlem to The Hague to visit a humble nurseryman. He had produced a tulip that came as close as possible to true black. Having sold it to his visitors for 1,500 florins, the breeder watched in horror as they stamped the bulb to pulp. They, too, had bred a black tulip and wanted no competition.
Although such anecdotes are unsubstantiated, they have confirmed the sable bloom as the philosopher’s stone of floriculture. Within the romance of tulipmania, its melanic petals exert an irresistible pull like some dark star. And its fame continues to reverberate and propagate to the extent that when the Dutch decided to open an institution at Lisse devoted to the history of their hallmark flower, what else could they call it but the Museum of the Black Tulip?
