What really surprised Goldgar, given Mackay’s tales of financial ruin, was that she wasn’t able to find a single case of an individual who went bankrupt after the tulip market crashed. Even the Dutch painter Jan van Goyen, who allegedly lost everything in the tulip crash, appears to have been done in by land speculation. The real economic fallout, in Goldgar’s assessment, was far more contained and manageable.
“The people who stood to lose the most money in the tulip market were wealthy enough that losing 1,000 guilders wasn’t going to cause them great problems,” says Goldgar. “It’s distressing and annoying, but it didn’t have any real effect on production.”