Tulip Mania

A period in the Dutch Republic, peaking in the winter of 1636 to 1637, during which contract prices for tulip bulbs, especially rare virus-streaked broken varieties, rose to extraordinary levels before collapsing in February 1637. Traditionally presented as history's first recorded speculative bubble and a byword for irrational market mania, it sits inside the Dutch Golden Age, the same decades of commercial wealth, colonial trade and civic pride that produced the Dutch Republic's rise as a maritime and financial power. The scale of the traditional account is itself a live dispute among economic historians: Peter Garber and others working from surviving notarial and contract records argue the episode was a much smaller, largely futures-market phenomenon among specialist growers and traders rather than an economy-wide mania, a revisionist reading that has not displaced the traditional account in general reference works.