tulip mania

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" (viseroij), displayed in the 1637 Dutch auction catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a set of Tulips") by Pieter Cos. Its bulb was offered for sale between ƒ3,000-4,200, depending on weight (gewooge). A skilled artisan at the time earned about ƒ300 a year.

Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history. In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a then-unknown socio-economic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. It had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic (now the Netherlands), which was one of the world's leading economic and financial powers in the 17th century, with the highest per capita income in the world from circa 1600 to 1720. The term tulip mania is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.