The speculative bubble that burst in the Netherlands in 1637 was called tulip mania.
During the Dutch Golden Age, rare tulip bulbs became fashionable luxury goods. Some bulbs were traded through contracts promising future delivery, and prices for particularly unusual varieties rose dramatically. In early 1637, confidence broke and buyers became unwilling to meet the high prices being demanded.
Tulip mania is often presented as the first modern financial bubble, although historians debate how widespread the speculation was and how severely ordinary Dutch households were affected. The surviving evidence suggests that the most dramatic stories may exaggerate the episode.
The episode remains important because it illustrates a recurring market pattern: enthusiasm pushes prices far beyond ordinary use value, expectations become self-reinforcing, and a sudden loss of confidence causes demand to disappear. Tulips were not shares in a company, so this was a commodities speculation episode rather than a stock-market crash in the narrowest sense.