Tulipomania: Unchanging Gender Relations in Financial Capitalism

Abstract

Tulipomania is often called the ‘First Financial Crisis’. Therefore, it is appropriate to examine the popular culture discourse of the so-called ‘mother’ of all crises in the first chapter. Current writings, however, cannot agree on a number of things about tulipomania: what motivated the Dutch to trade, who participated in the trade, whether it was a financial bubble, and how the crash impacted the economy and society. In this chapter, I do not aim to find out the truth about tulipomania, but will show how the ‘truth’ of tulipomania was produced in popular culture. I argue that the ‘truth’ was produced with a gendered orientalist understanding of the economy and scientific knowledge. Tulip bulb speculation was at a height from 1636 to 1637 in the early Republic of Holland. During the seventeenth century (aka the Dutch Golden Age), the country made significant advancements in science, technology, arts, and commerce. The Dutch keenness for exotic goods took them to the East, where they brought home previously unseen and unknown objets de curiosité such as animals, herbs, spices, plants, and flowers. One such ‘oriental’ object that fascinated the Dutch was the tulip from the Ottoman Empire. The flower not only attracted attention from botanists, breeders, and wealthy merchants, but it also made a number of people become traders. What were traded were not the blooming flowers, but the bulbs; not the bulbs of the present, but the bulbs of the future, the ownership of which entitled one to a piece of paper (Cook, 2007). One day in March 1637, the market for title papers cooled down, and title owners found it harder to find buyers. A few days later, trading activities further slowed down; the tulip bulb market was said to have crashed. The pattern of over-valuation, a drop in liquidity, and eventual market crash characterised many subsequent crashes. The story of tulip speculation may be