Tulip mania was the 1637 Dutch financial bubble widely considered the first recorded speculative market crash.
During the Dutch Golden Age, rare tulip bulbs became highly sought-after objects of trade. Contracts for bulbs could change hands repeatedly before the flowers were delivered, and some prices rose dramatically. In February 1637, buyers reportedly stopped appearing at a Haarlem auction, and confidence rapidly deteriorated.
The collapse affected people who had entered contracts at inflated prices, although historians debate how broad and economically damaging the event really was. Later retellings sometimes portray ordinary Dutch society as completely ruined by tulip speculation, but surviving evidence suggests that the overall impact was more limited than popular stories imply.
Tulip mania is important because it illustrates how expectations, scarcity, leverage, and herd behavior can inflate asset prices. It was a commodity speculation episode rather than a modern stock-exchange crash, but it is regularly used as an early example of a financial bubble.