Tulip: Exotic flower that caused the first economic bubble in Europe

Ulises Flores
19/10/2019

Greetings dear readers.

I am pleased to share the magical carnival flower colors that caused the first economic bubble that originated from the Netherlands and spread throughout Europe, this social and economic phenomenon was known as tulip mania.

To know and understand a little what happened, we must go back in this ecosystem of colors and move to the seventeenth century in the heart of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The vivid colors of tulip, belonging to the family Liliaceae, is an herbaceous and perennial plant that casts a beautiful and colorful bulb; the naturalist and botanist Carlos Linneo thus would classify it in 1753. However, by 1637 this flower had revolutionized Holland during its historic Dutch Golden Age, a time of prosperity for this small nation at the cost of slavery and other dishonorable methods of making wealth.

The economic valuation of this ornamental flower reached exorbitant levels, the extensive cultivation, commercialization, exportation and exchange for goods and services unleashed a wave of speculation and usury that made the market collapse; this surpassed the expectations and strategies of economic development, in fact the tulip was used as an object of payment, that is to say it was assigned a value as circulating. This madness led to an economic crisis that would be baptized by tulip mania, also known as crisis of the tulips. Source

Thus, Holland and several European countries would fall into crisis not because of the genuine beauty of these beautiful flowers, but because of the egocentrism of Homo sapiens aristocrat and bourgeois, who generated a system of opulence and appearance of power based on flaunting the most exotic and extraordinary specimens of tulips. The scientific advance could decipher and give logical answer of why for the time, in Holland it came to develop and to harvest certain multicolored and unique variety for then.

This added value to the product and whoever possessed the most colorful and exotic specimens, was the one with the most social stratum and wealth. The truth is that the multicolored phenomenon in the species is given by a virus (Tulip Breaking Potyvirus), which is transmitted to the plant by an aphid, but it was not a hybrid or supernatural species; it was an anomalous physio-morphological development. Source

So beautiful is this marvelous flower, which was employed to spread a system of slavery, exploitation, pillage, and the most aberrant egocentric follies of a nation that felt the collapse of its own evil. The care of the environment and the implementation of ecological consciousness is everyone's duty. As Rousseau said Man is good by nature, but it is society that corrupts his natural condition. So much for my descriptive photographic and historical sharing...

References

• Dutch Golden Age link
• Tulip Festival – The Spring Magic of Istanbul link
• Tulip mania link

Resources

All photographs were taken with Iphone 6 mobile camera equipment at the National Botanical Garden.
of Ireland.
Photoshop cs6 software was used to resize the photographs and place the author signature.

𝐼 𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛,
𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡