What was the name of the 1637 Dutch financial bubble involving tulip bulbs?

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The 1637 Dutch financial bubble involving tulip bulbs is known as tulip mania.

Tulips became fashionable in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century, and rare varieties attracted intense speculation. Contracts for bulbs were traded at increasingly high prices, sometimes before the bulbs were lifted from the ground. In early 1637, prices collapsed, leaving some contracts difficult to settle and undermining confidence in the market.

Modern historians debate how broad and severe the episode was. Popular accounts often portray ordinary Dutch society as universally consumed by speculation and claim that one bulb could buy a house, but surviving evidence does not support every dramatic version of that story. Tulip mania is still important because it became one of the best-known examples of a speculative bubble. It is also distinct from the later South Sea Bubble in Britain and Mississippi Bubble in France, both of which involved eighteenth-century company shares rather than tulip contracts.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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