The First Meme Crash

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 longer arc

The 1720 crash it mocked was really three crashes in sequence: John Law's Mississippi Company collapsed in Paris that spring, the South Sea Bubble burst in London that summer, and a wave of copycat Dutch windhandel, or wind-trading, companies selling shares in nonexistent ventures collapsed in Amsterdam that autumn, having openly imitated the French and English schemes within months of their launch. Dutch publishers, watching all three implode from a market that had stayed comparatively sober, rushed the satirical compilation into print before the year was out.

Because printers sold the engravings, poems, and mock stock certificates as loose sheets rather than a bound book, buyers assembled their own copies in whatever order and combination they wanted, which is why no two surviving originals match. Amsterdam itself weathered the episode better than Paris or London and remained Europe's leading financial center for most of the following century. Modern economic historians, including William Goetzmann's team, which produced a full English-language study and digitization published by Yale University Press, still use the collection's imagery to gauge which specific bubble schemes ordinary Dutch readers understood well enough to lampoon.