Bubble objects Producing the Dutch stock market crisis of 1720

This dissertation investigates how the Dutch stock market crisis of 1720 was actively produced, mediated, and remembered through material and visual culture. The dissertation shifts attention away from the idea of crisis as a singular financial event and instead examines how decorative art objects, engravings, and texts shaped the ways people experienced and gave shape to financial speculation.
At the centre of the study are “bubble objects”: a term that is coined to describe playful objects such as playing cards, folding fans, tobacco boxes, and tableware. These objects invited users to engage interactively and performatively with ideas and experiences of financial speculation and crisis. By analysing their iconography, mediality, and materiality, the dissertation shows how a crisis was produced through interaction with various media.
A major focus is The Great Mirror of Folly, an extensive book (and collection) about the crisis, which is reinterpreted as a “bubble object” in its own right. The dissertation explores how its prints and texts from this collection draw on theatrical repertoires—including folly, commedia dell’arte, masquerade, theatrical devices like the magic lantern, and alchemy—to stage the instability of value in an emerging paper economy.
Using methodologies of theatre studies, art history, material culture studies, and literary analysis, the dissertation argues that this crisis functioned as an ongoing performative process rather than a one-time economic rupture. Furthermore, it highlights how financial knowledge was constructed and shows how the 1720 crisis created a blueprint of crisis that is still familiar to us today.