Tulipomania - Mike Dash [103]
NOTES
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