'A fascinating exploration of human greed and self-delusion and also a tribute to our ageless search for beauty' DEBORAH MOGGACH. In 1630s' Holland thousands of people, from the wealthiest merchants to the lowest street traders, were caught up in a frenzy of buying and selling. The object of the speculation was not oil or gold, but the tulip, a delicate and exotic bloom that had just arrived from the east. Over three years, rare tulip bulbs changed hands for sums that would have bought a house in Amsterdam: a single bulb could sell for more than £300,000 at today's prices. Fortunes were made overnight, but then lost when, within a year, the market collapsed. Mike Dash recreates this bizarre episode in European history, separating myth from reality. He traces the hysterical boom and devastating bust, bringing to life a colourful cast of characters, and beautifully evoking Holland's Golden Age.
In the 1630s the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story—how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had (and much that they didn’t) on tulip bulbs. We have heard how these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and how some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania is seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation. But it wasn’t like that. As Anne Goldgar reveals in Tulipmania, not one of these stories is true. Making use of extensive archival research, she lays waste to the legends, revealing that while the 1630s did see a speculative bubble in tulip prices, neither the height of the bubble nor its bursting were anywhere near as dramatic as we tend to think. By clearing away the accumulated myths, Goldgar is able to show us instead the far more interesting reality: the ways in which tulipmania reflected deep anxieties about the transformation of Dutch society in the Golden Age. “Goldgar tells us at the start of her excellent debunking book: ‘Most of what we have heard of [tulipmania] is not true.’. . . She tells a new story.”—Simon Kuper, Financial Times
A revised and updated edition of the internationally bestselling classic Anna Pavord's now classic, internationally bestselling sensation, The Tulip, is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has driven men mad. Greed, desire, anguish and devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the worldwide phenomenon it is today. No other flower carries so much baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution. Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? Anna Pavord, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, spent six years looking for answers, roaming through eastern Turkey and Central Asia to tell how a humble wild flower made its way along the Silk Road and eventually took the whole of Western Europe by storm. Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, this irresistible volume has become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift and a joy to all who possess it. This beautifully redesigned edition features a new Preface by the author, a revised listing of the best varieties of this incomparable flower to choose for your garden and a reorganised listing of tulip species to reflect the latest thinking by taxonomists.
A sensual tale of art, lust, and deception—now a major motion picture In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy. Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia's likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist. As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household’s inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception—and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax. In this richly imagined international bestseller, Deborah Moggach has created the rarest of novels—a lush, lyrical work of fiction that is also compulsively readable. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion. Praise for Tulip Fever “Sumptuous prose . . . reads like a thriller.”—The New York Times Book Review “An artful novel in every sense of the word . . . deftly evokes seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s vibrant atmosphere.”—Los Angeles Times “Need a brief escape into a beautiful and faraway world? Deborah Moggach’s wonderful Tulip Fever can offer you that.”—New York Post “Taut with suspense and unexpected revelations.”—Entertainment Weekly “Elegantly absorbing.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times “A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?
*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading If one were to glide over the Dutch countryside via helicopter in the springtime, the beauty below them would seem almost surreal. The rolling rectangular fields are composed of immaculately neat, horizontal stripes in vibrant swatches of scarlet, pink, lavender, cream-white, and midnight-blue. The ethereal sight is even more breathtaking when one takes a stroll along these fields, surrounded by endless carpets of bright color. These world-famous three-petal, three-sepal flowers, all craning their necks towards the dazzling sun, are none other than Dutch tulips. The Netherlands is now the world's leading commercial producer of tulips, shipping out more than 3 billion of these colorful beauties each year. Standard tulips, depending on where one is based, typically sell for anywhere between $1.00 to $3.50 USD per stem today. They are a creative alternative to roses, lilies, and other traditional flowers. Needless to say, like every other floral breed, special tulips - such as hybrids, or ones with unique, multi-colored streaks and patterns - will cost buyers a pretty penny, but a bouquet is certainly not going to break the bank. Legend has it, however, that this was not always the case. As a matter of fact, these delightful "harbingers of spring" were supposedly once so rabidly sought-after that it wasn't just more valuable than gold - men threw themselves into financial ruin all for the sake of attaining just one of these sacred flowers. At the crescendo of what is now remembered as "Tulip Mania," or the "Tulip Craze," a single, shallot-like bulb of an unripe tulip was worth 20 times the annual salary of a skilled laborer. This aggressively volatile period, marked by convoluted and careless market speculation, inevitably culminated in the disastrous bursting of one of the world's first financial bubbles, an example of the perils of herd mentality. But how much truth is there to this oft-repeated story of the Tulpenmanie, really? Tulip Mania: The History and Legacy of the World's First Speculative Bubble during the Dutch Golden Age analyzes the legendary mania, and whether it was as dramatic as portrayed. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Tulip Mania like never before.
The jargon of economics and finance contains numerous colorful terms for market-asset prices at odds with any reasonable economic explanation. Examples include "bubble," "tulipmania," "chain letter," "Ponzi scheme," "panic," "crash," "herding," and "irrational exuberance." Although such a term suggests that an event is inexplicably crowd-driven, what it really means, claims Peter Garber, is that we have grasped a near-empty explanation rather than expend the effort to understand the event. In this book Garber offers market-fundamental explanations for the three most famous bubbles: the Dutch Tulipmania (1634-1637), the Mississippi Bubble (1719-1720), and the closely connected South Sea Bubble (1720). He focuses most closely on the Tulipmania because it is the event that most modern observers view as clearly crazy. Comparing the pattern of price declines for initially rare eighteenth-century bulbs to that of seventeenth-century bulbs, he concludes that the extremely high prices for rare bulbs and their rapid decline reflects normal pricing behavior. In the cases of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, he describes the asset markets and financial manipulations involved in these episodes and casts them as market fundamentals.
