Tulip Mania: Myths vs. Reality | Dutch Economic History

[00:00:00][Music] hey there extra historians welcome to lies the part of the show where we tell you all the stuff we left out all the things we got wrong and all of the leveraged buys we short sold uh i'm rob i'm the head writer of extra history and today we're talking about the tulip mania which i'm so excited to talk about thank you for voting for this series i love that we got to do another weird and wonky economics series especially one that is so heavily misunderstood including by me when i started this uh first of all i just wanted to say lies is made possible by patreon thank you so much to our patrons i say it every time because it's true lies is a really important part of the show not just to like keep us honest and point out the fact that we make mistakes but also to tell you just our in general editorial notes and thoughts and the decisions we went through when making this series i think that's not only good for us but it's useful to someone who might want to try and make their own series or is getting into this and it makes history a conversation which it always should be recommended reading for this series is tulip mania money honor and knowledge in the dutch golden age by anne goldgar no surprise we mentioned her i think three or four times in the course of this series her recent work has been really important to understanding and recontextualizing the tulip mania so the book is very extensive it's quite long and uh it marshals a lot of evidence it's a fantastic piece of work uh it's not necessarily like easy beach reading but not every good historical book is uh it's fantastic thank you so much if you're watching uh for expanding our knowledge of this topic next one is tulipomania the story of the world's most coveted flower and the extraordinary passions that aroused by mike dash this is a more readable kind of public history treatment of it it does engage in some of the myth building that anne goldbaugh has since tried to break down but it's a it's still a very cool interesting book just fyi we use the term tulip mania but sometimes tulip omania is is used and was used at the time we just went with one over the other to keep it consistent extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds by charles mckay as we mentioned in our series this book is kind of a trash fire it's very much like victorian tabloid history and just totally makes stuff up uh it was still kind of an important book for me when i was getting interested in history academically it's very readable it's really fun it still influences kind of how i see history because i read it at a really crucial time in high school during my development of understanding history and the idea that beliefs that are not necessarily true can be a a huge motivator uh for big events having said that you know i wouldn't say don't read it but it's probably a better lens in looking at how victorians saw the past than it is uh in actually understanding the events that take place in it but it's a very entertaining read to this day there's a reason it has stayed in print the embarrassment of rich is an interpretation of dutch culture in the golden age by simon shama this isn't exclusively about tulip mania uh but it mentions it a bunch of times and talks about a lot of the cultural reasons that people liked tulips and seashells i have a seashell here by the way i was unable to get tulips there just aren't any to be had in hong kong right now uh the season where they're getting shipped here passed by when we were proofing the episodes visually they were everywhere in like uh grocery stores and florists and you just can't get them right now so i have an orchid instead and some other stuff you might find in a cabinet of curiosities like like a quartz crystal and a seashell if you want to learn more about this topic we are sponsored by curiositystream and partners with nebula curiositystream has a wide range of documentaries on historical topics including one on the tulip bubble called the tulip bubble and another called the billion dollar flower market which is a british documentary comparing the british cut flowering industry to the dutch gut flower industry and kind of this david and goliath story if you don't know the netherlands is the world's number one product producer of commercial cut flowers and one of the numbers they give in this documentary is that the the netherlands at times produces 200 000 cut flowers per hour so it's just a huge industry as we talked about in episode five uh one general question from youtube i hope that at some point in the series you can touch on the special tulip relationship between canada and the netherlands after canada liberated the netherlands from nazi germany in world war ii the dutch sent over special red and white tulips as a thank you and have continued to do so every year since then this is such a cool story i did not come across that so thank you for telling me that that's very cool um so the netherlands sends canada tulips for world war ii and canada sends portland maine a christmas tree for helping after the halifax explosion so that's a cool little chain of gifting episode one youtube question we had multiple commentators i did not know this was going to happen multiple commentators who claimed to have accidentally eaten tulip bulbs thinking they were wild onions and talked about those experiences uh one of them was i suspected the story about the sailor was false because when i was little i tried to eat a tulip bulb thinking it was an onion and after one bite i realized my mistake is apparently they're apparently very bitter another guy said funny story i once ate a wild tulip thinking it was a wild onion i know that man isn't that man wasn't just regretting the price tag a few hours later yeah one of many reasons this story is considered false is there is no way to eat a tulip bulb and think it as an onion and continue eating it what the second commenter was referring to is that tulip bulbs are also poisonous they're not going to kill you but they're going to cause some severe gastrointestinal upset and they were eaten sometimes or people tried eating them during major famines and in world war ii this happened but it's really like a worst case scenario like i cannot eat anything else kind of thing because it's it's going to cause some pretty bad gi symptoms we had a great comment that i'm i'm so glad uh came in as a dutchman qualified in history i have to say this video is very wrong about the dutch republic obtaining its wealth from the voc that's the dutch east india company in fact the voc wasn't very significant until the 18th century what made the dutch republic such an economic powerhouse was the trade with the baltic the wheat trade was still by by far the largest in europe and the dutch economic system which was way ahead of its time was especially prevalent in trade with the baltic not with the east indies it's a very common misconception but i feel like this is important enough to point out as it disproves a lot of points about the 17th century trading being all about spices yeah so a lot of information that we go through in the first episode kind of comes under the umbrella of us telling the myth rather than the reality and this is one of those things that kind of plays into that we had a larger description of the baltic trade in episode three we talk about grain imports but we don't really tie them to like the larger baltic trade and and particularly wheat and lumber we had a couple of paragraphs about that but they got cut for length uh we have to really specifically make sure our each episode script comes at a specific word length and sometimes things get cut out of that often i talk about them in lies as a result whether people bring them up or not uh but basically the reason the netherlands could afford so much of its population being artisans and uh business people and in trading is because uh it doesn't have a large part of its population taking up growing food they trade for it and they're involved in the baltic grain trade the baltic wood and lumber trade and it frees up a lot of workers for other industries and yes this is a large reason why the netherlands got so rich before a lot of returns came in with the east india company or the west india company in the caribbean which often also gets forgot forgotten episode two patron question from bjornd i'm sorry i apologize if if that's uh i looked it up i thought that was the pronunciation the use of expensive gardens with exotic greenery isn't exclusively from tulip mania i've visited a couple of older castles and mansions here in the netherlands some of the castles have been in constant use as housing for more than 700 years and it's a staple to see a couple of trees in the gardens that aren't local sometimes not even european it was prestigious to have a tree from a far as far away as possible and do note that these were not trees that were planted as seeds but trees that were dug up roots and all then transported to be replanted i have no idea how big these trees would have been when they were shipped probably quite small when i've come across this so my speculation would be that in a time of greater wealth tulips could be an extension of this practice especially when the wealthy were more urban and living in cities you didn't easily have the room for these large trees but if everyone knows how expensive this flower is who needs a tree this is a uh great expansion and he's totally right about this gardening and the development of cultivated gardens was a thing particularly among uh european aristocracy long before tulipmania uh you know to you have tutor gardens and things like that there are a couple of differences and of course trees and kind of transplanting trees continues to go on we talk about a little bit in the history of coffee actually where we talk about these royal royal botanical gardens that have samples from all around the world and even in our series on brazil right one of the things that they do is they create a royal botanical garden uh in rio and this is like a big state state building thing and that's part of what carolus clusius is doing right in the tulip mania series he's helping create these botanical gardens which do have these exotic samples from around the world um but yes he's totally right about this um this is a long established practice before tulip mania one thing that's different is that tulip mania is like small scale it's individuals it's but also tulip mania starts to really get into the botanical and scientific aspects of cultivation on hybridization and changing uh these often when you have these trees that are transplanted often they're diplomatic gifts too these these trees including into the modern era right one of the things that happens right after the attack on pearl harbor is that people in washington dc go and they cut down these these uh cherry blossom trees that were given to the us by japan which is very sad um and you know to this day during the trump administration france sent a couple of trees from uh the battlefield at bellow wood to be planted on white house grounds so this still goes on this transplanting of trees as gifts but this scientific aspect this individualistic kind of like hobby scientific aspect of it is fairly new uh youtube question about adrian powell and his mirrors i want to know how much these mirrors cost it wasn't exactly a cheap trick back then given the time period there was probably a lot more silver behind the glass and silver wasn't cheap yeah it's probably very expensive you could probably repurpose these mirrors from somewhere else in the house i have doubts about this story for what it's worth not as much doubts as i have for the ones i just say like nah that didn't happen i sometimes i when i look at this i wonder if this is something he did for like a garden party or only at certain times of year where they weren't going to get wet or damaged i'm like 70 to 80 percent convinced that this mirror box showing a bed of tulips like multiplying the size of a bed of tulips is a real thing um having said that a lot of people who own things like cabinets and curiosities were very interested in optics one of the reasons that they have lots of crystals is they do start realizing like i can hold this in a beam of sunlight and it you know sprays out a spectrum of colors and that's really interesting and isn't this curious um so people are really interested in optics and optical illusions and things like that at this period so it does seem like something a rich guy in the 17th century would do i don't know if he necessarily did it all year maybe if he had a really important guest he's like bring out the mirror box you know um so i i don't know but he was very very wealthy so uh it's interesting someone commented that the rise of popularity for tulips and both the ottoman empire and the netherlands was influenced by religious prescriptions and taboos that restricted how rich people could show off their wealth it's an and really interesting observation and in both it's permitted because the tulip is seen as a work of god and not created by humans something that i think is really fascinating is it kind of marries this divine appreciation for divine creation with scientific experimentation and creation right so you're not just admiring this tulip because it's the work of the divine but you're also using it to hybridize another with another tulip and create a new tool up so there's sort of like divine creation and scientific creation being married in this in this hobby which i think is super interesting and of course ottomans are no slouch when it comes to science too so they're also approaching it in a scientific manner as well when they're they're gardening with tulips a bunch of people got the easter egg of trezen the infinite being in a uh the cabinet of curiosities so for those who are not familiar for warhammer 40 000 trezen is an immortal uh alien android who has decided he's the overlord of a planet and he's decided he's going to use his immortality to create a giant gallery of everything he possibly can he's kind of like the pt barnum of the of the cosmos or slash the british museum so he goes stealing things and people in uh in little holographic light prisons and displaying them as if they're part of a big museum um and so it's it's funny for him to be in a cabinet of curiosity so it's tras and trapped in a museum and if you didn't know one of the reasons that we did this joke is that i write tresen uh for the black library so uh it's a little bit of like a meta joke and a meta joke uh it's crazy to think that tulips still hold their power over people to this day many of our farmers have to fend off tourists wanting to take pictures in the fields because of the damage it's cost yeah in episode five we talk a little bit about like tulips do have this weird kind of attractive quality that is still uh around to this day instagram like there if you search there are uh news articles about how instagram uh has really badly impacted the tulip fields because people just keep walking into tulip fields in the netherlands to take uh take instagram photos and uh kind of end up getting chased off by tulip growers one thing i also just want to point out is we talk a lot about like flower prices cut flowers are just expensive like if you've ever had to you know get flowers for a wedding or even just go buy you know a dozen roses for valentine's day or an anniversary or something like that you're gonna spend on them like it's not that unusual to spend a hundred us dollars on a dozen tulips that might even be kind of a good price depending on when in the year you're buying them and where you are episode three we said this is probably the biggest mistake of the series entirely my fault we said that this practice of taking out a loan and putting just a little bit down on several tulip contracts was short selling in reality it's buying on the margin this is actually a two-part mistake so i made a terminology mistake on one part my intention was to say that taking out capital for a loan that you can't cover and thinking that the asset you're buying is going to inflate in price enough that you can uh sell it and pay off the loan is short selling that's not short selling uh that is uh leveraged buy um and the s what was originally a second sentence we talked about like buying on the margin like putting a little bit down on a bunch of different uh a bunch of different stuff a bunch of different uh tulips that you don't have the money to cover so these were two separate things that ended up getting combined during editing and i used the wrong term in the first place because there's a reason i don't like handle my own retirement accounts myself because i'm not good at it so i apologize it was quite a big mistake i was looking at a different part of one of the source books uh one of the sources that was talking about short selling tulips and i just got the term terminology confused another one for this episode the united provinces did have an aristocracy we said they didn't uh it was just less prominent than in other countries yeah even in the first episode we mentioned like the prince of orange in his court so what we meant to say was that the aristocracy did not have like their hands on the levers of power to the extent that there wasn't like an aristocratic class that was controlling everything in the same way as a lot of other countries in europe uh but yes they did have an aristocracy episode four ah this is such a great patron question by peanut tree 5000 didn't broken tulips go extinct the disease that made them look that way shortened their life and made them able to produce less bulbs i would like to know if they're still around that's partially true so all of the famous varieties we talked about like semper augustus and admiral of admirals and um a lot of them we refer to generally like admiral vanek if they were called like admiral vanek venek was the grower that produced it it wasn't talked about like it's not a famous admiral it was being named after or alexander the great they're all extinct the virus weakened them to the point with successive generations they just died out um but broken tulips are still around the mosaic virus or tbv tulip breaking virus still impacts tulips and lilies and actually at the time they would intentionally spread the virus not knowing that that's what they were doing by taking a a piece of an infected bulb and grafting it onto a non-infected tulip bulb so they they thought that they were cross-breeding it this way but actually they were just spreading the virus for some reason back in the 17th and 18th centuries tulips infected with tulip-breaking virus stayed a lot healthier than they do these days like today if a tulip gets a mosaic virus the stem is very short the bulb is very small it looks sickly it's not aesthetically pleasing for whatever reason back then they still looked fairly normal except for not having as many offsets being a little bit weaker and having these flame-like or spotted patterns um but uh most uh there are broken tulips stay but they're through breeding rather than uh rather than the virus there are a couple of very rare varieties that are broken from a virus and still look relatively healthy to this day but like i said they're very rare and expensive you can still pay a lot for a tulip uh onto youtube questions and comments the big one here is uh we had a graph where the numbers were 16 36 16 37 and it should have been uh 16 37 at the end of the graph we put 1636 it's just simple mistake i'm so excited about this someone said i never realized that harlem uh in the netherlands was related to harlem in new york yes so a lot of uh place names in new york and street names are related to when it was new amsterdam some of them are anglicized dutch words or terms some of them are just direct translations so i have a great list of examples some anglicized versions of dutch words are the bronx staten island brooklyn yonkers the bowery and of course nassau and there are some translations from dutch to english like broadway wall street long island and coney island i think long island was like lang lang island um and coney island was uh dutch for rabbit and coney is an older uh older english word for rabbit i really wanted to do a little like short sidebar about this during the episodes but we never got time to do it uh i really like this question because it gets into an interesting process thing of how we make the episodes how come you change the dutch army uniforms in this series they're different uniforms in jewish pirates number four conquest of india episode 2 and this episode they all take place at roughly the same same time period why why are they different so when we do an episode we find uh image resources that the artists can look at that are from the time and and place that this takes place um so if the image sources for stuff in india is different from things in like the caribbean uh we're going to do two different types of uniforms the uniforms in this one the frame is when they're trampling the tulip fields and that's specifically from a painting called the tulip folly and i have it here we wanted to directly reference this painting because it's a one of the more famous images of the tulip mania but this was painted in 1882 by a french artist named jean leon jerome and so it's produced you know over 200 years after and he probably wasn't that familiar with 17th century dutch military uniforms but so basically we're calling out this painting specifically a lot of people were like calvinists as anti-capitalists so there's this book that comes out in 1905 by a german sociologist max weber called the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism this is one of the central books that kind of like ties the idea of protestism but particularly calvinism as sort of this hot house for creating capitalism it should be said that modern historians like any book that comes out in 1905 have complicated this picture a little right like capitalism kind of started to pop up in italy and france well before the northern areas of germany that weber talked about in his book but also you know talking about any group of people as monolithic is always going to have some issues with it and a lot of modern scholars have talked about whether this thesis is even necessarily true about calvinism but this especially for americans we kind of have this idea that like the american capitalist model came from these puritans that settled uh settled new england it's true and not right um but i think it's really important to remember that like capitalism is a pretty new thing and even people that you would think would uh be kind of sympatico with capitalism like calvinists are still kind of having trouble squaring their beliefs which are very much scripture based with this system that is like a little more ruthless you know the bible says things about helping your neighbor and you know being charitable and how does that square with this new capitalist economic model and you know the that hasn't totally fit together at this point in time so i think that's cool it's one of the reasons i wanted to include it in the series is it runs against a lot of times what we think about the relationship between protestantism and capitalism and actually we are going to have to do something a little different today because i'm traveling next week i didn't want to i wanted to shoot most of this with my setup here in hong kong but episode five since it's not out yet i'm gonna have to shoot that little bit in the u.s so we're going to jump a little bit down the timeline to next week shooting this this week we're jumping forward to next week and i'm gonna bring you back it's a little bit of time hopping i'm going to use my statler pencil this is a reproduction 17th century pencil i got in nurnberg uh where statler is based it's really cool actually but it's going to be a magic wand right now and i'm just going to transporto hey extra historians welcome to extra history mid-atlantic campus uh i'm i'm my house in the u.s so uh i have actually a bunch of collectibles behind here and i want to talk about that because uh we didn't really have a lot of actual questions for episode five but people were very interested in kind of continuing the discussion that we started in in the episode uh people want to talk about the railway mania and wonder if we do an episode on that maybe but i really wanted to talk about how what i loved about this series is it made me understand how people spend money more and how all of us do it and what it made me realize is that we spend money emotionally most of the time um just like we eat emotionally frequently we spend money for a lot of different reasons um something that is very valuable to me could be just patently ridiculous to spend money on to you right like uh when i was growing up uh my mom didn't want me to do like collectible card games or or comics because they were consider she kind of considered them disposable whereas uh like when i was in college and just after college i used to buy like vintage magazine advertisements out of old time and life magazines and frame them as art and that's a magazine that probably sold for 25 cents in like 1966 and here i am like taking a movie advertisement out of it and buying it for 20 bucks and then spending you know probably triple that to frame it um and again to even as i was doing it i'm like this is absurd like this is the actual value of this is less than a cent likely but i don't know i wanted that and i was willing to spend you know however many dollars like 70 80 bucks to have a cool piece of art unique piece of art framed on my wall um so i just wanna i just keep thinking about that and now that i see that everywhere that like oh this thing is very meaningful to you and you want to spend money on it whereas i just i don't really care and also like the idea that when you buy something you also buy access to a community of people who like that thing often if you're doing a collectible right like if you're into stamps like and you have a stamp collection you go to like the stamp fancier's ball or whatever um but you know if like if you buy uh role-playing books or like gaming miniatures then you can go to a club and play with other people like that stuff uh and this is basically every hobby in the world is like knitting circles right so i i just it's made me change how i look at how people spend money and how i spend money and i just thought that was very cool all right back to back to hong kong and last week my daughter took the magic wand out of my suitcase while i was packing magic verticals thanks for that little transition and let's go to what's coming up on extra history the ethiopian empire focusing on the solomonic dynasty this is a really hard series to do because it covers 700 years a lot of it we don't have very good image resources for so we we did what i think is is a heroic effort to try and like visually design this this period or these multiple periods uh it's going to be very cool uh i also want to call out ali's art for this series was fantastic nick has worked really hard on the next series as well then we're doing eleanor of aquitaine this is going to be a four-episode romp through medieval royal marriage and just crazy family politics she's the only person to have ever been queen of france and queen of england and of course she's the mother of richard the lionheart the wife of henry ii and uh you know her son king john is uh prince john is trying to steal the throne from his brother all the time uh after that we just got through easter rising ireland's day of reckoning this is going to be a really cool series about the uh the conditions that lead up to the uh irish war of independence and irish civil war even batu's side trip i wanted to talk about the role the netherlands played in the american revolution which i think is undervalued so we all know about like france is the chief ally of the american colonists and trying to win independence but there is major support that comes from the netherlands john adams goes to uh goes to the netherlands in 1778 to secure a loan but here's the thing uh that loan is private officially the netherlands is a neutral nation partially because william the fifth uh who's the stat holder the the chief magistrate is related to george the third right because he's william is the prince of orange so uh there's a little bit of discomfort there but there are a lot of private uh individuals who are transporting war material to the uh the united states and uh the netherlands gets in trouble for it uh the british start interdicting more material and uh they end up grabbing 35 dutch ships and the netherlands starts to join this uh this group called the uh the first league of armed neutrality which is set up by catherine the great in russia russian ships are also going to the us uh the british find out that they're going to join this this group they get angry they declare war on the netherlands and they fight the anglo-dutch war ending in 1884 after the american revolution is already over uh it actually sends the dutch empire into decline the dutch east india company takes a bunch of losses there's only one really major naval battle but there's a lot of a lot of fighting in the colonies kind of piecemeal um but you know between weapons shipments uh loans being extended and also just you know it's the second uh second nation to recognize the united states as independent it's the first nation in uh 1776 to fire a uh a cannon salute to the american flag so there's like a morale boost as well as uh as all of these very practical uh pieces of aid so thank you netherlands that's uh that's a very i i think it's an underappreciated uh contribution to american independence and they suffered for it a lot more well i don't know if they did suffer for it more than the french guess that it depends on how you look at it and how you see the french revolution but uh thanks so much for tuning in i had such a great time with this series please join us next time see you later the most legendary thanks to ahmed zion turk alicia bramble angelo valenciana arcolite games casey musta dominic valenciana joseph blame and kyle murgatroyd [Music] do [Music]