The 17th-century Dutch speculative bubble involving tulip bulbs was called tulip mania.
Tulip mania developed in the Dutch Republic during the 1630s, when contracts for certain tulip bulbs changed hands at increasingly high prices. Tulips had become fashionable luxury goods, and rare varieties were especially prized by wealthy buyers and collectors.
The market collapsed in early 1637 after buyers failed to appear at an auction in Haarlem. Prices fell rapidly, and many contracts became difficult to enforce. The episode is often presented as history’s first major speculative bubble, although historians debate how widespread the mania was and how severely the broader Dutch economy was affected.
Modern retellings sometimes claim that ordinary people across the Netherlands were ruined or that the entire economy collapsed. Evidence supports a sharp speculative reversal, but the national economic consequences were much smaller than those of later stock-market crashes such as 1929.