Tulip fever is still remembered as a parable about the evils of capitalism and mass hysteria, but what really happened? Asks Eliot Wilson

It is one of those half-remembered, quarter-understood facts to illustrate the ineffable foolishness of human nature. In the first half of the 17th century, the zenith of the Dutch Golden Age, the small but prosperous, hard-working, commercially savvy population of the United Provinces of the Netherlands had achieved extraordinary prosperity. They enjoyed a monopoly on the spice trade and were making inroads into Portugal’s trade in sugar.

Material wealth jaded the palette as it always does. One fascination the Dutch merchant classes developed was for tulips. The first bulbs of these brightly coloured exotic flowers arrived in Amsterdam and Antwerp towards the end of the 16th century, probably from the Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Fascination overheated into obsession, the prices a tulip could command spiralled out of any reasonable sense of genuine value, and in the mid-1630s tulip mania became the first recorded asset bubble in commercial history.

The stern Calvinist ministers of Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk (old church) could scarcely have asked for a better morality tale. Tulip mania also has a delightfully delicate but semi-serious tinge to it, matching high finance and dark-suited burghers with extravagantly coloured blooms.

But what really happened?

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