Hey guys, its Nick. The real story of
tulip mania. Right now.
A huge bubble. A country gone mad over
tulips. An economy destroyed. At least
that's what we're always told right.
Tulip mania is often cited as kind
of the first speculative bubble, but is
it the real story. You know when I first
started researching this topic I thought
it would be easy. You know the first
speculative bubble. Just read a
few books on it. Get a handle on kind of
what's going on and what I found was not
what I expected. It's the exact opposite
all most of what we're told. Yes there is
a tulip bubble and people do buy and
sell a lot for tulips, but it's not the
whole story. It's not what really
happened. Let me give you an example.
A lot of our modern imagery for
Tulipmania comes from Charles MacKay's
Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The
Madness of Crowds. Goldgar a historian,
who's done a lot of research on this
subject, has said we really need to take
Charles McKay's book with a lot of salt.
Goldgar says, "McKay's chief source was
Johann Beckmann author of a History of
Inventions. Beckman was concerned about
financial speculation in his own day and
Beckman's own sources were suspect. He",
meaning Beckman "relied chiefly on
Abraham Munting a botanical writer from
the late 17th century. Muntings father
had lost money on tulips and Munting
was not a reliable eyewitness. His own
words often verbatim come chiefly from
two places."
Meaning he basically plagiarized. "The
historical account of chronicler Lieuwe
van Aitzema in 1669,
and one of the longest contemporary
pieces against the trade," translated as
"Dialogue Between True-mouth and Greedy-
Goods of 1637. As Aitzema himself was
basing his chronicle on pamphlet
literature, we are left with a picture of
tulip mania based almost solely on
propaganda cited as if it were fact.
Alright so what does all that mean right. Well
imagine that something as big as
like the 2000 tech stock bubble happened
four hundred years ago. And
the only sources to survive was like
a few blogs basically and maybe your
newspapers local opinion piece.
These are hardly kind of the historical
accounts you would hope to find
about something. And then imagine that
over the centuries people have used
those and cited them as fact and kind of
building on it as it goes along. And then
400 years later you're left with
something that doesn't look like
anything it looked like. That's basically
what's happened to Tulipmania is what she's
saying. All that is why we need to take a
fresh look at tulip mania. And in order
to understand why tulip mania became
tulip mania you have to understand the
kind of the time period right. You have
to place it in historical context. I want
you to imagine that Jeff Bezos and Elon
Musk and all these people launching
rockets in to space right.
Imagine that they come out tomorrow and
they say, 'We are going to create an
interstellar spaceship. It's going to fly
to a distant Sun where there are planets.
And they're going to go and see what
they can find.' And so few years later
they blast this rocket off into space. It
disappears for a while right. They're
traveling faster than light, hopefully
we've invented that. They go off
to this distant star. We don't hear
anything from them and then suddenly
they come back. Not only do they
come back, but they come back bringing all
sorts of cool and interesting stuff like:
alien flowers, alien plant, alien animals
that they've stuffed. You imagine how many
of us would just be glued to our TV
screens just watching and being like, "What is
that? What's that? What does that do? My god. I wonder...
You know like that sense
discovery of looking at things
and seeing new things that we never seen
before. And when you think about
that scenario, you get an idea for what
the feeling must have been like for
Europe during that time. Because this is
a time when Europe is starting to get
stuff from the East Indies, from North
America, from South America. I mean even
the potato gets introduced. Like the
potato. The boringest... thing you can think
of is coming over at this point in time.
The thing that we were just like, "ohh yeah
it's a potato." It's new.
And one of the things that comes back is the tulip. Now
traditionally credit goes to this guy Ogier de Busbecq
or something like that.
He's an ambassador from the Holy Roman
Empire to the Ottomans.
Historians have kind of gone through and
pointed out the fact there's a number of
problems with him introducing it. One is
when he gets out there he would have had
to send a bulb or offshoot back
right away. Which is possible, but
it's not very likely. Additionally he
misremembers a few details.
One of the biggest nails in the coffin
is he's writing this like a while later and
tulips already kind of gained popularity
in Europe at this time. So you kind of
wonder that human emotion played
in he's like, "Yes I introduced the tulip...
to Europe... me... all me baby." So you
wonder if played into it at all.
So historians kind of doubt that he's
actually the one who introduced it to Europe. They think it probably just
came over and trade at some time before
that. My favorite story is a story of
this of this Flemish merchant who gets
a shipment of cloth from the Ottoman
Empire. And supposedly there is just bag of tulips
there for no reason at all. It's just like sitting there. And of course he has no idea what
a tulip is. So he just like takes it home
and thinks it's some onion and grills
it up and eats it basically. And
there's some conflict in the stories, but
either he loves it, or he just hates it.
Either way this guy Joris Rye comes into
the picture. And the only reason he's
important is because he gets us to
Carolus Clusius. Because he introduces
Carolus Clusius to the tulip. Supposedly,
probably not, but you know it's history. It's how
these things go. Carolus Clusius you
gotta mention in the story because he's
basically responsible for taking the
tulip and like spreading it all over
Europe. He's what we call a botanist
today. He lives a very privileged
life. He's able to basically
travel around Europe and look at flowers and
stuff like that. He doesn't really have a
house of his own so he ends up sending
all these things that he finds to
his friends. He maintains a lot of
contacts all over Europe. (laughter)
One of the stories you just have to mention about
Carolus Clusius. He's a Protestant and
is in the employ of the Holy Roman
Emperor whose Catholic. The Holy Roman
Emperor is kind of cool with Protestants
at this point in time. The fact that he's
just not actively killing Protestants is
a pretty big deal. You have to remember
this is the point when Protestants and
Catholics are still killing each other
over pretty minor differences in the
Christian faith; what we would consider
pretty minor differences. So he's in
the employ of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Clusius actually has a private garden.
There's only a few of these tulips in
Europe. He goes out to his garden one morning
and a ton of his tulips are gone.
They're stolen. It's funny because
flower thefts are actually kind of a big
thing. If you're Noble and you
want a flower (garden) then what's the
easiest way then just go steal them from
the Protestant over there. And at
one point he's supposedly forced to
endure being at this noble woman's house
and seeing his own flowers in her garden.
You just have to think he was like, "So
where'd you get those flowers huh. How'd
you get those." She's like, "Oh yes I got
them from my friend.. blah blah blah" and he's
just like, "Really, really, really you didn't ahh
steal those from my garden... perchance... hmm
Only maybe few of those in Europe now...
and you didn't get them for me...
no okay yeah... yeah... it's fine... yeah..." You know.
Hashtag like #RichPeopleProblems right.
And then of course the Emperor dies
only like two years after taking a job.
The new emperor takes over and he's not
really friendly with
Protestants and he's on a flower lover.
So uh kicks Clusius out and the whole
gardens destroyed. So he takes some odd
jobs here and there, but in the 1590s
Clusius gets a letter from a Dutch
Republic, the University of Leiden, and
they say, 'we want you to come here and
teach the botanical stuff at our
University" And Clusius takes the job.
Which brings us to the main setting of
our story the United Provinces or
The Dutch Republic. At this point in our
story it's helpful to ask why tulips.
Why did tulips suddenly become
popular and not something else. Why not
stuffed birds? Why not shells, which we're
coming over in this period and we're
getting pretty big. Well in order
to understand why tulips and not
something else the first thing we need
to talk about is tulip reproduction.
All right so tulip reproduction
basically happens in one of two ways:
there is seeds and then there's
offshoots. The first method is
seeds. You know seeds right. Seeds. They're
seeds. If you've dealt with the plant you've seen the seeds.
They take about six to nine years
in order the flower. Which at this point
in history you only livin' till about
forty on average. And you could easily
get taken out before then by the plauge,
your city getting sacked,
or your appendix burst. Any
number of things. So they're not really
the preferable method. In addition to the
length of time you have to wait there's
also the factor that it's not really
going to look like the tulip you got it
from. There's gonna
be a lot of differences. The preferable
method is actually called offshoots. Now
you have the mother bulb, which is in the
ground and then the flower shoots out
from there. And when it's in the
ground they'll develop these
almost growths on the bottom of it and
these are called offshoots. When you lift
the bulb during the summer you can
actually just take these offshoots off.
And it's only going to take about 2 to 3
years for it to actually flower. And then
once it actually does flower it's going
to look pretty close to the original
flower you got from. It's basically a
clone, although there's some issues with
this that you'll see later. The mother
bulb can produce about 2 to 3 of these
every year for a few years before it ends up
dying. So this is the preferable method.
Now why is all the tulip reproduction
stuff important right. The first
thing to keep in mind is that the supply
does increase every year right. This is
not like an exotic stuff to bird.
Suddenly you're not going to have two
exotic stuffed birds right. The other thing
to keep in mind is that the supply
increases very slowly. So even if that
demand increases supply isn't
necessarily going to increase that much.
What does that mean? Rising prices.
The other thing to keep in mind is that rare
equals desirable at this point in time.
Nowadays this part of the world is
synonymous with tulips, but it
wasn't like that. The Dutch Republic
is just getting introduced to
these flowers which are new and exotic
and newcomers from the Middle
East basically. The other cool aspect
that really I think puts the flower head
and shoulders over its competition is,
its ability to spontaneously change.
So for example one year you might have
a Tulip that looks like this. It's nice. It's
yellow. It's beautiful. And then over the
course of the summer it goes
into remission or
basically dormant for the year.
And then next year it comes back up and
suddenly it's different. It's not yellow
anymore it's yellow with red.
And this ability that it just
would change. And it be the same tulip,
but suddenly it was different. There's
nothing seemingly... you didn't do anything
necessarily to the flower. And nobody of
the age could tell anybody why it
happened. Nobody had any idea.
This was an age when
questions about viruses and bacteria
they weren't even guessed at.
There are stories of people try to get these
multicolored tulips by pouring
red wine over the flowerbed or they
would lite their garden on fire with
pigeon dung because they thought that
would do it. It's kind of like
the lotto every year like, 'Is it
going to change this year or not.'
Adds a sense of suspense. And so you
get this ability of the flower just to
change spontaneously. And that's probably
one of the biggest reasons why the tulip
starts coming head and shoulders over
the rest. Another reason we'd be remiss
not to mention is the social aspects.
You have to remember at this point
in time in the Dutch Republic, this is the
original land of opportunity in a lot of
senses. This is where the pilgrims
went before the pilgrims became the
pilgrims. If you're American you know who
I'm talking about right. The Pilgrims and
Plymouth Colony all that stuff the hats
everything right. When they left
England they didn't go directly to
America they went to the Dutch Republic
first. And then they realized their kids
are kind of becoming Dutch and they're
like, "Hey we want you to be English and
not Dutch. We want to be English just not
in England. So let's go to America."
Additionally people could work their way
up through the ranks. You could
start off as a peasant and work your way
and become wealthier and wealthier and
become whoever you want to be.
Whereas the rest of Europe is you're
born you're born a peasant you stayin'
a peasant right. This is different in
the Dutch Republic. But then you run into
a problem of, how do you distinguish
yourself from other people, how do you
show status in this society. And one of
the things that starts coming into vogue
is collecting. This is because of
the Renaissance and all this cool stuff
coming over from the East Indies. And
flowers or tulips are kind of one of these
things that is in the sphere of things
that people collect.
When Clusius arrives in the 1590s
there isn't necessarily a market yet for
tulips. It's developing its there but
it's not like a market as we think of
today. Basically it's a group of tight
knit people who are really interested in
flowers. You know they trade them back
and forth. This is viewed as a
gentlemanly activity. You know you give
gifts to other people. It's kind of a
social activity, you know they'd go to
their houses they talk about flowers but
it's really about hanging out.
But I want you to imagine that you're
one of these merchants who's come up
through the ranks and you're starting to
earn a lot of money. And you want to show
off your status. You want to show
off the fact that you've earned a lot of
money and you're getting
getting near the top. And in order to show off that status to show off
that collection one of the things you
want to do is acquire tulip garden, but,
for reasons we've already discussed, the
supply is kind of limited.
It's hard to get your hands on
these tulips. How do you go about
getting some if the supply is so limited
and the group is pretty
tight-knit? Well what we'll see is that
these people end up resorting to some
very ungentlemanly methods. Next week.
It's really the journey and not the
destination for me. The training wheels
aren't on right. and the futures market is
imploding spectacularly. Modern banking
is basically created. We see so many
things that are vital to our economy
today that are invented during this
period. If you aren't subscribed then
subscribe now and you'll get notified.
Otherwise if it's already next week and
you're already seeing this video now
then go ahead and click the video over
here and I'll catch you next week
For more infomation >> Famosos como Kate del Castillo y Banda MS confesaron intimidades | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 2:29. 
For more infomation >> Reacciones a la cita en corte de los hijos de Juan Gabriel | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 2:51. 
For more infomation >> Camila Sodi ama a sus fans pero no a la prensa | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 0:36. 
For more infomation >> Mara Patricia Castañeda no olvida a la familia de su exesposo | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 0:39. 
For more infomation >> A Zuleyka Rivera le parece tierno Justin Bieber cantando "Despacito" (VIDEO) - Duration: 0:38. 
For more infomation >> Carolina Sandoval habló sobre dietas de los Billboards | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 1:45. 
For more infomation >> Chiquis cuenta cómo se prepara para una alfombra roja | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 3:34. 
For more infomation >> Consuelo Duval se siente celosa de Salma Hayek | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 0:36. 
For more infomation >> Las tendencias de la moda de Premios Billboard | Suelta La Sopa | Entretenimiento - Duration: 3:41. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét