A seminar on Dutch tulip mania is suspended after four undergraduates form an investment collective and start holding bulbs until the market recovers
A second-year seminar on the Dutch Golden Age was suspended last week after four students studying the tulip mania of the 1630s refused to accept that the market had crashed, and announced that they were “holding” their tulips until the price recovered.
The students, all aged between 20 and 22, are reported to have become deeply invested in the subject after their tutor explained that at the height of the craze in the Dutch Republic, rare tulip bulbs changed hands for sums that could have bought a house.
Seminar Suspended as Students Refuse to Sell
“I made one small mistake,” said Dr Ingrid van der Molen-Hayes, lecturer in early modern European economic history at a university in the English Midlands. “I showed them a picture of the Semper Augustus, the most celebrated bulb of the whole affair, and told them that people at the time talked about it being worth as much as a grand house on an Amsterdam canal. I saw a young man at the back open an app on his phone. I should have stopped the lesson there. I did not stop the lesson there.”
By the end of the hour, four students had formed an investment collective, created a group chat named Bulb Gang, and drawn up a whiteboard chart showing the price of tulips rising steeply from left to right. The chart ended abruptly in February 1637, when the market in the Dutch city of Haarlem collapsed within days. The students have since added a small handwritten note at that point reading “buying opportunity”.
“People keep saying it crashed,” said Ryan Oyelaran-Pike, 21, a history and economics student who wears sunglasses indoors. “I would say it is consolidating. Tulips are a long-term play. You do not judge an asset on four hundred years of performance. You have to zoom out.”
Diamond Hands, Onion Roots
Dr van der Molen-Hayes said she had attempted to explain that much of the trading at the peak of the mania involved contracts for bulbs that were still in the ground, meaning people were buying and selling the right to flowers that did not yet exist. This, she had hoped, would strike the students as a cautionary tale.
It did not. “So it was digital,” said Jasmine Kettering-Obi, 20. “They had created a digital flower. They were three hundred and eighty years ahead of the market. The problem was not the tulip. The problem was the infrastructure. Holland just was not ready.”
The group has since produced a short video explaining their thesis, filmed in the university botanic garden. It has been viewed eleven times, nine of them by Oyelaran-Pike’s mother, who has left a comment asking whether he has eaten.
Dr van der Molen-Hayes also pointed out, several times, that tulip bulbs have occasionally been eaten in the Netherlands in desperate times, and that at least one story from the period, possibly exaggerated in the retelling, describes a sailor who mistook a hugely valuable bulb for an onion and ate it with his herring. The students regarded this as a security breach rather than a lesson. “That is why you need cold storage,” said Kettering-Obi. “Not your pocket. Not near fish.”
The Historians Have Something to Say
In an attempt to restore order, Dr van der Molen-Hayes set the class a reading from the historian Anne Goldgar, whose book on the episode argued that the mania was far less catastrophic than popular legend suggests. Goldgar found little evidence of widespread ruin or people throwing themselves into canals, and argued that much of the famous story was built on moralising pamphlets written after the event.
This backfired. “So the crash was fake news,” said Oyelaran-Pike, standing up and nearly knocking over his coffee. “The historians are literally telling us it was not that bad. I am not selling. I am never selling. I am buying more.”
The seminar was suspended at that point.
A Warning From the Seventeenth Century
The episode has prompted some reflection within the history department about how the subject is taught to students who have grown up online. Professor Aldous Brightwater-Nkemelu, head of department, said the tulip mania had always been a useful teaching tool precisely because it felt remote and faintly ridiculous. “For years we taught it as a funny story about Dutch merchants losing their heads over flowers,” he said. “Students would laugh and write very sensible essays about speculation. Then something changed. This year, several of them looked at the chart and said it looked like a good entry point.”
He added that the department had considered replacing the unit with the South Sea Bubble of 1720, in which British investors piled money into a company trading with South America, only for the share price to collapse later that year. The idea was dropped after a student remarked that South Sea sounded like a great name for a token. The department has since considered teaching the Mississippi Scheme in France, and has also ruled that out.
Bulb Gang Presses On
At the time of writing, the four members of Bulb Gang had pooled their resources and purchased a single tulip bulb from a garden centre near the ring road for one pound forty-nine. They have planted it in a pot on the windowsill of a shared student house and have agreed not to sell it until it is worth at least one Amsterdam canal house.
“We are in no hurry,” said Kettering-Obi. “Tulips flower in spring. By spring, we think the market will have noticed us.”
The bulb is reported to be in good health, although a housemate who was not consulted on the investment strategy has twice moved it into the kitchen and once, according to a message later circulated in the group chat, looked at it in a way the collective described as “onion adjacent”. A formal risk review is under way.
The London Prat, which has watched British students chase every financial fad since 1961, contacted Dr van der Molen-Hayes for a final comment. She said she had learned an important lesson about teaching economic history to young people, and that next year the unit on tulip mania will be taught entirely without charts. “No pictures of houses, no prices, no arrows going up,” she said. “Just flowers. Pretty flowers. That is all anyone is getting from me now.”
SOURCE: https://prat.uk