Some historians have cast doubt on the historicity of tulipmania, suggesting that popular accounts may have fabricated or exaggerated the real event. Anne Goldgar, a historian at King’s College London, found that “there weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor.” Had there really been a tulip-based economic collapse, there would have been much larger ripple effects in the wider economy. Instead, Goldgar “couldn’t find anyone that went bankrupt.”
An alternative explanation is that the size of the bubble was inflated by Dutch Calvinists, who frowned on the profiteering of the Amsterdam stock market and viewed the tulip bubble as a warning against capitalistic excess.