Tulip Mania: Real Prices, a Ruin Story Traced to 1637 Satire

What was tulip mania?

Reported: Tulips were still new and rare in Holland in the 1630s, and the bulbs that fetched high prices carried a mosaic virus that streaked the petals in feathered patterns, a pattern that bred true only through buds of the mother bulb, never from seed [3][5]. Because the bulbs spent most of the year underground, sales took the form of contracts for future payment and delivery, which after the crash came to look like windhandel, a trade in wind [5].

Reported: In November 1636 a futures market in common bulbs opened in local taverns, where each sale carried a payment of “wine money,” and the biggest price rises followed in January 1637 [3][6]. Garber's figures for one common variety, Switser, show the speed. Contracts went from 0.035 guilders per aas (one-twentieth of a gram) on 23 January to 0.17 on 5 February, nearly a fivefold rise in under two weeks, and notarized deals on 6 and 9 February were back at 0.11 [3]. In early February the market broke, and for the most part buyers would not pay, which left sellers holding the bulbs [5].

Assessed: Read as a price chart, those weeks look like madness. Traders at the time saw something narrower: a scarce, fashionable good, sold on paper, with delivery months away and prices that had been climbing for weeks [3][6].

How much did a tulip bulb cost in 1637?

Reported: Goldgar puts the most expensive tulips at around 5,000 guilders, the price of a well-appointed house, while Tim Harford, writing for the BBC in 2020, gives 5,200 guilders as the highest single-bulb price “for which we have good evidence” from that winter [6][7]. Most prices were far lower, Goldgar writes, and she identified only 37 people who spent more than 300 guilders on bulbs, a sum she equates with about a master craftsman's yearly wage [6]. Garber's table of three named bulbs sits between those extremes. On 5 February 1637 an English Admiral was priced at 700 guilders, an Admirael van Eyck at 1,345 and a General Rotgans at 805; by 1642 or 1643 the same varieties fetched 210, 220 and 138 guilders [3].

What was a tulip worth in a craftsman's wages?

For a scale from the time, we converted these prices into days of wages. The rate is the daily wage of a master craftsman (meester) in the Amsterdam and Holland series that Robert C. Allen compiled from J. de Vries and A. van der Woude (1997): 25.29 stuivers a day at the 1635 benchmark, the closest to 1637, with 20 stuivers to the guilder [2]. Goldgar's buyers came mainly from the merchant and skilled-artisan class, so a craftsman's wage is the closest available match to the people in the trade [6].

Reported, with our conversion: At that rate, the 300-guilder line equals about 237 days of a master's wage and the 5,200-guilder bulb about 4,112 days. The English Admiral of 5 February 1637 equals about 554 days, and the same variety in 1642 or 1643 about 175 days at the 1640 benchmark of 24.04 stuivers [2][3].

Assessed: The 237-day figure matches Goldgar's “yearly wage” only if a master was paid for about 240 days a year; we found no source for paid days, so we do not convert to years. Wage-days show what a price meant to that worker then and there, not a modern-dollar value or a living standard.

Where did the story of mass ruin come from?

Reported: Mackay's chapter “The Tulipomania” is the basis of most modern images of the craze, in Goldgar's reading [5]. He wrote that “the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade,” and that “substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary.” He ended his account of the Dutch trade with the claim that “the commerce of the country suffered a severe shock, from which it was many years ere it recovered” [1].

Reported: Goldgar traced where Mackay got this. His chief source was Johann Beckmann, whose history of inventions went through many English editions from 1797 on, and Beckmann relied mainly on Abraham Munting, a botanical writer of the early 1670s [5]. Munting took his words, often verbatim, from the chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema (1669) and from a 1637 dialogue written against the trade, Samen-spraeck tusschen Waermondt ende Gaergoedt, which Goldgar cites under the name of Adriaen Roman, while Aitzema in turn worked from the pamphlets [5]. Goldgar concludes that the familiar picture rests on one or two pieces of contemporary propaganda and a great deal of copying [5].

Reported: Garber reached a similar finding: in his reading, all the sources go back to three anonymous dialogue pamphlets of 1637, written by partisans against speculation [3]. Goldgar adds that even the leading Dutch accounts, by the economic historian N. W. Posthumus (late 1920s and early 1930s) and the bulb grower Ernst Krelage (1942), rest mainly on the pamphlets [5].

Think of the story's route to Mackay as a supply line with a single depot. Each later writer drew stock from the 1637 pamphlets, or from someone who had, and in Goldgar's account the result was a picture based almost solely on propaganda [5].

Reported: From Mackay the story passed into economics. Garber found the 1926 edition of Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy defining a bubble and giving tulipmania as an example, Paul Samuelson citing it in 1957 and 1967, and Charles Kindleberger's 1987 entry in The New Palgrave naming it one of the two most famous manias [3].

The order of retelling as text

• 1637: dialogue pamphlets written against the trade [3][5].
• 1669: Lieuwe van Aitzema's chronicle, drawing on the pamphlets [5].
• Early 1670s: Abraham Munting, quoting Aitzema and Roman's dialogue [5].
• 1797 on: Johann Beckmann's history of inventions in English, relying chiefly on Munting [5].
• 1841: Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, relying chiefly on Beckmann [5].
• 1926 edition: Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy gives tulipmania as an example of a bubble [3].
• Late 1920s and early 1930s: N. W. Posthumus's articles, based mainly on the pamphlets [5].
• 1942: Ernst Krelage's book, based mainly on the pamphlets [5].
• 1957 and 1967: Paul Samuelson cites it [3].
• 1987: The New Palgrave names it one of the two most famous manias [3].
• 1989–90: Peter Garber returns to price data [3].
• Undated: Earl Thompson and Jonathan Treussard read the contracts as options [4].
• 2007: Anne Goldgar's archival study [5].

Was a Viceroy bulb really traded for oxen, wheat and cheese?

Reported: Mackay prints a list of goods, from “two lasts of wheat” and “four fat oxen” to “a silver drinking-cup,” worth 2,500 florins in all, says they were “delivered for one single root of the rare species called the Viceroy,” and credits the list to an author he calls “Hunting” [1]. Goldgar reads the same list differently: it was given as equal to the cost of one Viceroy bulb, and only later did it become, for some writers, the actual cost [5].

Assessed: A list of equivalents tells you what 2,500 guilders could buy, while a list of goods handed over tells you that a buyer gave up oxen, grain and furniture for one bulb. Only the first reading is supported by the sources we read.

What did the florists decide when prices broke?

The card at the top of this page applies what we call the known-then test: scoring a decision only on what its makers could know at the time, with each item tied to a source.

Reported: After the break, tulip traders in the towns met and sent deputies to Amsterdam, Mackay writes [1]. Thompson and Treussard date the key decision to 24 February 1637. In their account, the florists ruled that futures contracts written after 30 November 1636, and before the cash market reopened in spring, would be treated as options, so that a buyer could walk away by paying the seller a small fixed share of the contract price [4]. Mackay puts that share at ten percent [1].

Put yourself among the delegates. You know that prices have just fallen hard, that no bulb can change hands until early summer, and that the newest contracts were signed in the weeks of fastest rise [3][6]. You do not know how far prices will fall, or whether any court will make a buyer pay.

Assessed: Given what the delegates knew, a date cut-off made sense as a sorting rule, because it singled out the contracts signed during the fastest part of the rise. What happened to older contracts is less clear: Mackay says they were declared void, a detail we could not confirm in the modern sources we read [1].

Who had the final say over the contracts?

Reported: The state's role is where the sources disagree. Thompson and Treussard write that the florists' decision was later ratified by the Dutch legislature, and that the fee was finally set at 3.5 percent of the contract price after more than a year of negotiation [4]. Goldgar's archival account describes authorities who reacted slowly and hesitantly, and a provincial court of Holland that suggested the parties talk it out among themselves and stay out of the courts [6].

Reported: Goldgar calls the February losses notional: anyone who had both bought and sold a tulip on paper since the summer of 1636 had lost nothing, and the sellers still waiting for payment could bear the loss [6].

Did tulip mania ruin the Dutch economy?

Reported: Goldgar found no bankrupt in these years who could be identified as ruined by tulips; when tulip traders appear in bankruptcy records, they are buying the houses and goods of people who had failed for other reasons [6]. She describes the Dutch economy as unaffected, and Garber found no evidence of serious economic distress, noting that histories of the period treat it as a golden age [3][6].

Reported: Who traded is contested. Goldgar describes buyers drawn mainly from the merchant and skilled-artisan class, often linked by family, religion or neighborhood, and she never found a chain of buyers longer than five [6]. Garber describes the tavern market in common bulbs as a mid-winter diversion among people with almost no wealth [3].

Assessed: The two findings can both hold if they describe different layers of the trade, but neither source we read counts the tavern traders, so we leave the question open.

The popular version against the record

Full table with sources (CSV) · Source and license notes (JSON) Data: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1852), Project Gutenberg, accessed 2026-11-02, public domain; Peter M. Garber, "Famous First Bubbles," Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no. 2 (1990): 35–54, accessed 2026-11-02, copyrighted, individual figures cited; Thompson & Treussard, "The Tulipmania: Fact or Artifact?" (working paper, undated), accessed 2026-10-07, copyrighted, individual figures cited; Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania (University of Chicago Press, 2007), publisher's excerpt pp. 1–7, accessed 2026-11-02, copyrighted, individual figures cited; Anne Goldgar, The Conversation (2018), accessed 2026-10-07, copyrighted, individual figures cited; Tim Harford, BBC News (2020), accessed 2026-10-07, copyrighted, individual figures cited

Was tulip mania a bubble at all?

Reported: Garber argued in 1990 that tulip mania should not count as a bubble, because prices of a prized new flower variety follow a standard pattern: the first bulbs sell high, and prices fall fast as bulbs multiply [3]. For his three bulbs he reports an average fall of 32 percent a year from February 1637 to 1642, close to the 28.5 percent a year he found for prized bulbs in the 18th century, which leaves the crash itself room for no more than a 16 percent price decline [3]. He made the same kind of argument about the Mississippi and South Sea schemes of 1719 and 1720 [3].

Reported, with our check: We reran Garber's arithmetic from his own table. The 32 percent matches a continuously compounded rate over five years, meaning the natural log of each price ratio divided by five (the three bulbs give 24.1, 36.2 and 35.3 percent, an average of 31.9). His 16 percent follows the same way, from 3.5 extra points a year over five years. Counted as plain year-on-year losses, the three bulbs lost about 27 percent a year, and 70 to 84 percent in total [3].

Did the contracts turn into options?

Reported: In an undated UCLA working paper, Earl Thompson and Jonathan Treussard read the numbers differently. Their quality-weighted index of contract prices stood about 20 times higher in early February 1637 than in early November 1636 or early May 1637, an annualized fall they put at 99.999 percent, against 38 percent in the least stable of Garber's hyacinth markets [4].

Reported: Their explanation is the contract change described above. An option gives the right, but not the duty, to buy at a set price, and once buyers could walk away for a small fee, a contract price behaved like that set price, so the headline prices overstated what sellers expected to receive [4].

Assessed: Neither economist settles whether the winter's prices were rational, and the sources we read do not let us settle it either. Much of the folly in the standard story is what we call the hindsight premium: the extra foolishness a decision acquires once everyone knows how it ended. Strip it out and the record shows a short, fast market in a luxury good, with the ruin added later, in print, by the trade's critics and the writers who copied them.