Tulipomania - Mike Dash [60]
Trading on the beurs was strictly regulated and was permitted only between the hours of noon and two. Each day’s trading had to be packed into those two hours, and the raucous frenzy that erupted within the quadrangle as the big clock in the tower struck midday was such that anyone strolling past the exchange at noon might be forgiven for concluding that the burghers had a point. Business was conducted at such a pace that brokers who years earlier had sealed each deal with an elaborate ritual of handshakes now merely slapped wildly at each other’s hands before rushing on to the next trade.
Hundreds of traders were licensed to deal on the stock exchange—there were perhaps four hundred official beurs brokers in the 1630s, and they were joined on the trading floor by up to eight hundred unlicensed freelance dealers who specialized in trading small packages of shares at low prices. In one description of the exchange, the contemporary writer Joseph de la Vega observed one such freelance dealer, who “chews his nails, pulls his fingers, closes his eyes, takes four paces, and four times talks to himself, raises his hand to his cheek as if he has a tooth-ache, and all this accompanied by a mysterious coughing.” Vega does not mention what his small-time broker was hoping to buy or sell for his handful of guilders, but he had a considerable choice: By 1636 at least 360 different commodities were traded on the Amsterdam exchange. Tulips, however, were not among them.
This fact may come as a surprise to those who assume that a financial calamity with the reputation that the tulip mania enjoys must necessarily have been serious and widespread and have had a significant impact on the stock market, on trade, and on the Dutch economy in general. Nothing could be further from the truth. The speculation in tulip bulbs always existed at the margins of Dutch economic life. It was conducted by amateurs, not professional traders, and was never subject either to the customs (however peculiar) or to the regulation of the stock exchange. The mania took, in fact, the form of a rough but intended parody of the trade in commodities and shares that flourished on the beurs. It was the province not of financiers experienced in the ways of business, but of country people and poor city dwellers who had, when they started dealing in bulbs, almost certainly never owned a single share in their whole lives.
The fact that the tulips were not dealt on the stock exchange does not mean the flower business was not regulated. In fact, it soon evolved into a complicated, even ritualized affair in which buyer and seller dealt according to fixed rules and were united by mutual obligations, agreed to in front of witnesses, and noted in writing. Like the brokers who once congregated on the New Bridge, the tulip traders needed somewhere to transact their business. Like the brokers, some of them used the house of God upon occasion; when the mania took place, the local church was a general meeting place pressed into use by everyone from local merchants to courting couples. Most, however, found it far more comfortable to buy and sell their bulbs in a convenient tavern. The tulip trader’s stock exchange was his local pub.
The “colleges” of growers and dealers who met in the back rooms of Dutch inns were such a central feature of the tulip mania that it is important to get an impression of what the taverns of the 1630s were like. Unless the conditions in which the bulbs were actually traded are understood—late at night, in smoke-filled rooms, by drunken men—the mania itself will always remain a mystery.
Inns were, to begin with, so common in the United Provinces as to be commonplace. In 1613, for example, Amsterdam already had five for every hundred inhabitants, which suggests that in 1636 there were probably two hundred packed within the city walls of Haarlem—an area not that much bigger than Hyde Park. These drinking houses ranged from full-fledged taverns to dingy cellars and apothecaries’ shops. Perhaps a fifth were unlicensed and illegal