The First Meme Crash

Money & Markets · Amsterdam, 1720 · The Great Mirror of Folly

TL;DR: After the crashes of 1720 wiped out speculators in Paris, London and Amsterdam, Dutch publishers produced something unprecedented: a giant crowd-assembled scrapbook of satirical engravings, poems and fake share certificates mocking the disaster. No two copies are identical.

What actually happened

Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid ('The Great Mirror of Folly') collected caricatures of John Law as a wind merchant, allegories of Lady Fortune defecating shares, board games of financial ruin, and playing cards of bankrupt investors. It was printed fast, sold loose, and bound by each buyer into whatever volume they wanted.

That format makes it, functionally, the first meme archive of a financial crash: decentralized, remixable, savage, and produced while the losses were still fresh. Harvard, Yale and Dutch libraries have digitized copies, and every one differs.

Economists still mine it: the engravings record which schemes the public actually understood versus which ones they only laughed at.

The play to remember

Ridicule is how markets metabolize catastrophe. The jokes after a crash are data about what everyone secretly knew during the boom.

Sources & fact flags: Digitized copies (Harvard Baker Library, Yale, Leiden); Goetzmann et al., The Great Mirror of Folly (Yale UP).

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