Tulipomania : The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused Paperback – January 30, 2001

This book was a pleasure to read. It is beautifully written, well-researched and it grabs your attention right away and holds it until the very end. I think Mr. Dash realized that even though the book is relatively short, most people would have been bored if the book had only stayed with a narrow focus on tulip varieties and the economic dynamics of the brief period during which the mania flourished. The author made a wise choice by going off into little interesting peripheral areas, such as the origins of the tulip in central Asia, the cultivation of the flower by the Ottoman Turks, and some aspects of social life in 17th century Holland. Did you know that when the flower was popular in Turkey some of the Ottoman soldiers went around with tulips embroidered on their underwear? Due to the Islamic prohibition concerning the artistic depiction of people and real life objects the embroidery of the flower had to be kept "undercover", so they placed it on the underwear! I don't want to give the impression that the book is a bunch of fluff. Mr. Dash never veers too far from the tulip mania and some of the best chapters in the book concern the botanical, economic and social reasons for the stratospheric heights tulip prices reached. Due to the way tulips reproduce it took a long time for new varieties (which were the most coveted) to be produced in quantity. Trading methods that we use today, such as buying on margin and trading in futures, also helped to fuel the craze, as did the tendency of the people involved to do their trading in taverns while consuming vast quantities of beer! Oh, by the way, I do want to explain the title of this review: In 1562 a shipment of cloth which had been sent from Istanbul arrived in Antwerp. The Flemish merchant who had ordered the cloth also noticed that the shipment contained some type of bulbs. They were tulip bulbs, but the merchant didn't know that. He assumed they were some type of Turkish onion, so he had most of them roasted and he ate them for supper, seasoned with some oil and vinegar!

A really detailed history of both the flower and the economic bubble that occurred in 1636 - 1637. I have read references to the Tulip Bubble in many other books over the years but never knew what it was in detail.The book starts with a botanical and geographical history of the tulip. The flower originated in Central Asia in the vicinity of the Pamirs and Tien Shan west of China. It spread to Turkey via traders in the 13th century, then to the Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries. It finally reached Holland around 1572. The Dutch then began breeding new varieties that were progressively more and more beautiful. For reasons that really have no logical explanation, a frenzied financial buying and selling bubble began around 1636. It was much like the famous "Mississippi Bubble" that occurred in France in the early 1700s and the British "South Seas Bubble." There was no real economic basis for it. People just thought that demand and prices could increase forever. Fortunately for the Dutch, the overall financial impact of the collapse on the national economy was minor.

An exceptionally entertaining book that sheds factual light upon the tulip frenzy of the 1630s. As a long-time student of economics and the development of markets, Dash's book is one of the few that trace's the development of the tulip market from its origin to the present time. Although not noted in most reviews, Dash also demonstrates how tastes and preferences can rapidly change of market from a boom to a bust.There are a few additions to the book that I think would significantly improve reader understanding. First, the book could benefit greatly by the insertion of maps. I was not at all familiar with the various regions of The Netherlands, for instance, which required that I find a separate source to understand the location Dash was mentioning in the book. Other maps of would have also benefited the reader (e.g., Ottoman Empire, Persia, Central Asia).The second omission of the book are line charts or bar graphs showing the prices of specific varieties of tulips over time. While stating that the price of such-and-such tulip "doubled, doubled again, and then doubled again" is fine, a visual graphs of prices over time would clearly show the dramatic changes in price.

One of the first Ponzi schemes where a Tulip costs more than a working man’s house.

I've wondered about this ever since I first heard of the tulip craze in Arts & Ideas of Western Man way back in college (1980). This book answered my long-pondered questions with excellence. And it was an easy read, too. People often ask me what I'm reading because I am a publishing industry professional. When I started to explain, "A book about the origins and impact of tulip trading on the Dutch economy..." most rolled their eyes. But frankly, it was riveting. I stood examining the ordinary tulips for sale at Home Depot for a half hour last week, asking myself, "Really? What were they thinking?"

On river cruise in Holland I decided to become more informed before I saw the tulip il fields, Mike Dash has told a good story about the history of these flowers from their beginnings deep in Asia to their migration to Turkey before entering Antwerp where a man at a warehouse on the docks picked up a stray bulb, went home with it and thinking it an onion ate it for dinner. The story of the tulip craze is one of honest lovers of this flower new to Europe and ordinary people who saw an opportunity to make some money and got caught up in the excitement of the possibility of becoming rich beyond their wildest dreams. Economics can be influenced by greed but operates within boundaries of supply and demand. This book was fun to read. Dash uses records of the times to build a story grounded in the world of the 17th century but relevant to all times.

Who knew that a whole nation could be obsessed about flowers, way before social media?