Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market

Abstract

The last few years have seen renewed fascination with tulip, expressed in form of series of popular histories of flower. For these books, key in tulip's history is so-called Dutch mania of 1630s, when-we are told-a frenzied speculation in bulbs inflated their prices to unbelievable sums. Tulips, which could normally only be sold between June and September when bulbs were lifted from ground to be stored over summer, began to be exchanged in something like an unregulated futures market: promissory notes for future delivery of bulb were exchanged for promissory notes for future payment. The same bulb-buried somewhere in ground-could be exchanged ten times in day. When this speculative bubble burst in winter of 1637, traders were left holding fistfuls of worthless paper.1At least, this is story as it is usually told-and there are good reasons to doubt some aspects of it.2 I do not in fact want to focus on mania, but I do want to draw attention to these books and their accounts of it, not for historical truth of those accounts but for way they use flower to raise questions central to developing global market, whether in early modern period or in our own moment. The modern tulip histories appear as part of broader phenomenon of commodity histories, which Bruce Robbins has recently identified as a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction (454). According to Robbins's account, these commodity histories seek to narrate emergence of global capitalism as scene of seduction in which Europe is invaded, penetrated, conquered, rescued, seduced, and dominated by foreign goods. These stories invite us to witness the birth of European desire-that is, birth of demand (456). But tulip histories- left out of Robbins's account-also have their own particular logic. In them, we are invited to discover the birth of demand in of madness, mania: Michael Pollan calls it a brief, perverse moment (xxiv), collective (62); Zbigniew Herbert refers to collective, uncontrollable passions (41) and psychosis (47).3 These books endlessly recycle anecdotes about tulip bulbs becoming more valuable than houses or land. Such stories exert double fascination: they invite sense that world of stable values, in which land should be worth more than tulips, has been stood on its head; and they turn this reversal of values into an index of secret attractive power supposedly hidden in tulip itself but in fact belonging to operation of market and dimension of human fantasy that constitutes it. Describing madness of tulip market, these books solicit our recognition of market's power to assign fantastic values to what might seem to be trivial or ephemeral objects. After all, it is naive to be shocked at high prices tulip bulbs could command, since exchange value is function of market, that is, of desire: value represented by commodity, as Marx famously wrote, is purely social (139).The tulip histories focus attention on dimension of fantasy that underwrites operations of market, demonstrating that determination of value is always fraught process, perhaps even mad one. This is clearly an issue with powerful resonance now, in wake of series of booms, bubbles, or extending from cyberspace to seemingly more sober and solid ground of realty market. This emphasis might seem to trouble celebratory relationship to market that Robbins discovers in most popular commodity histories; to speak of bubbles and manias is to speak of market regulation, need for oversight, and irrationality to which judgments about value are subject.4 But seen from another angle, tulip books fall very much in line with other commodity histories, as Robbins analyzes them, and it is here that they begin to open up reality of tulip as it was constituted in early modern period as well. …