The Pamphlet: A Reader's Companion

This guide accompanies the Time Rhymes story The Pamphlet, which sets the actual Dutch tulip mania of 1635-37 against the way that episode is constantly being invoked, in May 2026, to characterise the present capital-expenditure cycle for artificial intelligence. The structural insight is not that the AI investment is or is not a bubble. That is a separate empirical question. The structural insight is that the tulip analogy itself rests on a historiographical foundation built by Calvinist pamphleteers in 1637 and uncritically transmitted through Beckmann (1797) and Mackay (1841) into our present. The historians have known this for thirty-five years. The pamphleteers are still winning.

Why this matters now

When commentators, regulators or institutional investors invoke "tulip mania" in conversations about AI capital expenditure, they are doing two things at once. They are making an empirical claim about valuation (the price is too high relative to fundamentals) and a moral claim about character (the participants are foolish, the asset is intrinsically worthless, the eventual correction will be deserved). The empirical claim may be true or false. The moral claim is borrowed from a religious-ethical pamphlet, not from an economic analysis. Once you separate the two, the AI-bubble debate sounds different. Some warnings retain their force on the empirical claim alone. Others turn out to be doing the work of the pamphlet.

This is not an argument that there is no AI bubble. It is an argument that "tulip mania" is the wrong way to look for one.

Cast

Anne Goldgar (born 1957). American-British historian; until 2018 Professor of Early Modern History at King's College London; her 2007 monograph Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press) is the standard scholarly account of what actually happened in the Dutch civic archives. She reconstructed the trade, identified individual buyers and sellers, and found that the popular picture was based on a small number of satirical pamphlets uncritically transmitted.

Adriaen Roman (active c.1620-1645). Haarlem printer and pamphleteer; published the Samen-spraek tusschen Waermondt ende Gaergoedt in 1637, the most influential single contemporary source for the tulip mania myth. A Calvinist moral commentator writing about luxury and speculation, not an economic observer.

Johann Beckmann (1739-1811). German polymath, professor at the University of Göttingen; coined the term "technology" (Technologie). His five-volume Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen (1780-1805) included an account of the tulip mania based principally on Roman's pamphlets, which Charles Mackay then drew on.

Charles Mackay (1814-1889). Scottish journalist and editor. His 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds contains the three-page chapter on "The Tulipomania" that has been reprinted, paraphrased and analogised in financial journalism continuously for one hundred and eighty-four years. Mackay had no access to Dutch archives. He summarised Beckmann, who had summarised Roman.

Peter M. Garber (born 1949). American economist; his 1989 paper Tulipmania in the Journal of Political Economy and his 2000 book Famous First Bubbles (MIT Press) reopened the question of whether the 1636-37 price movements were even irrational, arguing on the basis of contemporary records that they were largely consistent with the rarity of broken-pattern bulbs.

Kristalina Georgieva (born 1953). Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund since 2019; her October 2025 and January 2026 statements drew the dot-com comparison publicly and underpin much of the current institutional commentary.

David Solomon (born 1962). Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. since 2018. His May 2026 acknowledgement that "a bunch of the capital being deployed in AI will actually not produce any returns" was widely reported as the most candid Wall Street admission of the cycle to date.

Jamie Dimon (born 1956). Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. His May 2026 endorsement of the trillion-dollar AI capex wave at an Anthropic event positioned him on the other side of the same conversation.

Timeline

• November 1636. Dutch tulip futures contracts trading at peak prices in Haarlem and Alkmaar.

• 3 February 1637. Haarlem auction collapses; no buyer appears for offered bulbs.

• 24 February 1637. Florists' guilds propose converting outstanding futures contracts to options contracts.

• May 1637. Provincial guilds agree on a settlement at approximately 3.5% of nominal contract value; Court of Holland declines to enforce contracts.

• 1637. Adriaen Roman publishes the Samen-spraek pamphlets in Haarlem.

• c. 1640. Crispijn de Passe and others publish the Floraes Mallewagen engraving.

• 1780-1805. Johann Beckmann publishes Beytrage zur Geschichte der Erfindungen in five volumes.

• 1841. Charles Mackay publishes Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

• 1989. Peter Garber publishes "Tulipmania" in the Journal of Political Economy.

• 2007. Anne Goldgar publishes Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge.

• 8 October 2025. Bank of England warns that US equity valuations look "stretched" on metrics "comparable to the peak of the dotcom bubble."

• 14 October 2025. IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva publicly compares the AI investment cycle to the 2001 dot-com bubble.

• 2 December 2025. Bank of England repeats the warning, focused on the debt-financed nature of AI infrastructure capex.

• January 2026. Georgieva repeats the warning at Davos.

• May 2026. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: "a bunch of the capital being deployed in AI will actually not produce any returns." JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon endorses the capex wave at an Anthropic event.

• May 2026. Goldman Sachs Research raises its 2026 AI capex projection from $465 billion to $527 billion.

• May 2026. OpenAI reportedly preparing confidential IPO filing at private valuation of $850 billion-plus; Anthropic in talks at $900 billion valuation.

What the pamphlets actually said versus what the archives say

| Question | Mackay (1841), via Beckmann, via Roman pamphlets (1637) | Goldgar (2007), via Dutch civic archives | |---|---|---| | Who participated? | "All of Dutch society": cobblers, chimney sweeps, sailors, peasants | Approximately 300 wealthy merchants and skilled craftsmen, often interrelated by marriage and religious congregation | | Peak Semper Augustus price | 5,500 to 6,000 florins (price of an Amsterdam canal house) | Notional; the specific famous transactions cannot be archivally corroborated | | Documented bankruptcies | Widespread financial ruin | Fewer than half a dozen, and even those not unambiguously attributable to tulips | | Documented suicides | Yes (per the pamphlets) | None found in archival research | | Wider economic damage | Dutch economy crippled for a generation | Negligible; VOC dividends and Eighty Years' War financing uninterrupted | | Source for the popular telling | The 1637 Roman pamphlets, transmitted via Beckmann (1797) and Mackay (1841) | The Dutch civic archives, including the Haarlem and Amsterdam notarial records and the Court of Holland's docket |

Discussion questions

1. The historical record of the tulip mania has been reliably available to scholars since Goldgar (2007) at the latest, and arguably since Garber (1989). The popular "tulip bubble" metaphor has not changed. Why does the metaphor persist when the historiography has shifted underneath it? What does that tell us about the function of historical analogy in financial commentary?

1. The 1637 pamphlets were written as Calvinist moral commentary, not as economic analysis. The pamphlets won the long-term battle over how the tulip episode is remembered. Are there parts of the modern AI debate that you can identify as importing a moral structure rather than an economic one? Both pro and anti.

1. The Bank of England, the IMF, the Goldman Sachs CEO and the JPMorgan CEO have all weighed in on the AI capex cycle in the past eight months. Three of those four parties have reached for some version of the bubble framing. The fourth has rejected it. None of them has the data to settle the question. What is the right institutional posture when the empirical question is open and the historical analogy is misleading?

1. The most striking finding in Goldgar's archival work is not the modest size of the trade but the close-knit social network of the participants. The tulip trade was, in modern terms, a private market for accredited investors. Is the AI capex cycle similarly private (the major participants are a small number of cloud hyperscalers, foundation-model labs, and sovereign-wealth investors) or genuinely public? Does the answer change what the right historical analogy would be?

1. If "tulip bubble" is the wrong analogy for the present AI cycle, what would be a better one? Some candidates: the late-19th-century US railway boom (massive capex, large fraction lost, infrastructure left behind transformed the next century), the 1990s telecom build-out (fibre overcapacity that eventually became the substrate for the consumer internet), or the 1955-60 US transistor investment cycle. Which one do you find most illuminating, and why?

Further reading

• Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2007). The standard scholarly account.

• Peter M. Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (MIT Press, 2000). The economist's revisionist case.

• Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). The original popular telling. Read it as the primary source it is, not as the secondary source it claims to be.

• Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (Crown, 1999). A popular history that pre-dates Goldgar but is alive to the Dutch context.

• Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Golden Age (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Essential background on the political economy in which the tulip episode took place.

The historical echo, in one sentence

When you reach for "tulip mania" to characterise the AI investment cycle, you are reaching for a frame built by 17th-century Calvinist pamphleteers and popularised by a Victorian journalist who had not been to Holland: the frame may still be useful, but the moral inferences it imports are not the same thing as an economic argument.