In Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Passions it Aroused, Mike Dash shows how simple commodities such as tulips can be imbued with diverse cultural meanings. He begins by looking at the Turks for whom tulips were laden with symbolic, religious, and sexual meanings. They were linked to ideas like fertility, perfection, eternity and modesty. Pious Muslims also treated the red mountain tulip as a religious relic, Dash tells us. When the plant reached the Lowlands of Europe via trade networks, it was, like most of our commodities, eyed by physicians as a potential medical resource. It proved useless for doctors, but the unpredictable beauty of the commodity led connoisseurs and careful growers to affix cultural significance to the item, and rare bulbs became a highly sought-after symbol of status, wealth, and good taste. As Dutch culture became comfortable with conspicuous display and the market for tulip bulbs began to strengthen, the scarcity of the commodity led to a greater demand and higher prices. This is when, Dash suggests, things took a distasteful turn.
Former tradesmen (and they all are men, no women ever worked in the tulip trade, apparently), like weavers pawned their looms, styled themselves "florists" and began buying and trading tulips. This new type of buyer cared nothing for the beauty of the commodity, they simply wanted to make a quick buck. Dash paints a very unsavory picture of these traders whom he labels greedy, inexperienced, and short-sighted. They thrived on the unregulated and unconfined trading scene, often conducted in a "haze of inebriation" in tavern rituals designed to boost the self-importance of the florists. They wrecked the traditional, common-sense rules of tulip trading by making it year-round thus boosting the futures market and leading to short-selling and potential fraud. "It became perfectly normal for florists to sell tulips they could not deliver to buyers who did not have the cash to pay for them and had no desire ever to plant them." It is little surprise that this volatile market with no safeguards eventually crashed in a spectacular way. The message Dash is offering is that unregulated capitalist situations are weak and prone to bubbles that can destroy markets, individual livelihoods, and the psyche of an entire nation.
In a post below, Joseph rejects the idea that the tulip is not a commodity because it lacks fungibility, which he defines as an accepted standard for trade. The finest tulips, because they were rare anomalies, were part of a fad and not a commodity, he writes. It is an interesting idea, but I disagree with the premise. Fungibility cannot be the only criteria for a commodity, and I reject that because a commodity becomes temporarily popular and expensive, it loses commodity status. Fungibility to me, simply means replaceable, as Marcy Norton mentions in Sacred Gifts, cacao beans were a fungible wealth, competing with precious metals as a currency." (64) Cacao beans could act in place of silver as money. In the blood banking book, also, Swanson says that a donation to a blood bank was a fungible unit, creating a credit was inserted in place of a pint of blood. (57) Even if my definition of fungible is off, though, I still believe that it cannot be a sole criteria for what constitutes a commodity. The most important criteria, I think, is that a group of people agree that a concept or item has a value, and that they are willing to pay for that thing. This suggests a cultural significance that is more important than fungibility. As Norton shows us with chocolate and tobacco, these goods were never just "things" in that they always existed in conjunction with their symbolic associations. Consumption is as much cultural as it is somatic and biological, therefore a commodity must be culturally framed and valued, as tulips were for a brief, majestic turn.
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