The Dutch tulip mania of 1636-1637 is one of the most famous examples of financial irrationality of all time. Charles MacKay's salacious rendering of the event sets the tone for all the other accounts that would follow in his footsteps. Were tulip speculators really MacKay's flies to the honeypot? Or were they little different to today's art collectors, swarming around an overpriced Banksy or Brett Whitley? This episode seeks to answer that question. Our guest is American historian and expert of 17th and 18th century European cultural and social history Anne Goldgar. She holds the inaugural Van Hünec chair in European history at the University of Southern