6 ideas
Notarial and court records show no wave of bankruptcies following the February 1637 price collapse, and no damage to the wider Dutch economy. Most buyers were well-off merchants and artisans who could absorb the losses, and the story of ruined chimney sweeps and weavers doesn't hold up in the archives.
The popular image of tulipmania comes largely from satirical pamphlets printed right after the crash, above all the 'Samen-spraeck tusschen Waermondt ende Gaergoedt' dialogues. Later writers such as Charles Mackay repeated these pamphlets as if they were fact. When the main sources for an event are sermons against greed, the resulting history records the moral panic rather than what people actually did.
The real damage in 1637 was social. Contracts were refused, promises were broken, and the networks of honor and credit that trade depended on were strained. People were shaken that value could vanish and that fellow citizens would walk away from their word.
Most tulip trades were forward agreements for bulbs still in the ground, often made in tavern 'colleges' with their own rituals. When prices collapsed, buyers refused to pay. The courts and the States of Holland declined to enforce the contracts and pushed the parties toward private settlement, and many deals ended at a few percent of face value.
High prices for varieties like Semper Augustus followed from real scarcity. Broken, virus-streaked bulbs could not be reliably reproduced, and elite collectors valued exotic flowers the way they valued art and curiosities. The trade grew out of a culture of collecting and connoisseurship, so it was not purely irrational speculation.
To test a famous episode, trace the documented participants, transactions, and consequences through contracts, notarial acts, and court cases, and count how many there actually were. Measured this way, a supposed nation-wide mania turns out to be a limited trade among a few hundred people in a handful of cities.