The naming of New York

Swiss botanist Conrad Gesner first saw the flower that was responsible for the naming of New York whilst on a trip to the Bavarian Alps in 1559. The delicate bloom had been imported to Europe from a faraway valley between the great Yangtze River and the Central Asian Steppe via Constantinople. With petals red in colour and with a sweet, soft and subtle scent, the exotic flower was believed by Turkish traders to have divine origins….Gesner was however struck by the peculiar turban-shaped form of the petals, and taking the Turkish word for turban, tulbend, as inspiration he gave it a European name- ‘tulipa turcarum’, or tulip for short.

The extraordinary chain of events that followed, and which ultimately led to the naming of New York, has since become a popular tale that parents relate to their children when they want them to grow up to become stock brokers. The story recounts how news of the new, beautiful and rare flower spreads by word of mouth across Europe, piquing the interest of Dutch nobility who soon begin importing tulips and adopting them as exotic status symbols- visible signs of their good taste and wealth….

To cater for the demand, Dutch shipping companies begin importing tulip bulbs from Turkey, local farmers begin cultivating them and city merchants begin trading them. But supply cannot keep up with demand-everyone wants tulips- and this fuels the demand. Throughout Holland, thousands of people give up their jobs to grow tulips, selling their homes and their land just to get their hands on the precious bulbs. By 1635, Holland is consumed by tulip fever, pushing tulip prices to astronomical levels; a single Viceroy tulip bulb sells for the equivalent of US$40000: four tons of wheat, eight tons of rye, one bed, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, one suit of clothes, two casks of wine, four tons of beer, two tons of butter, 1000 pounds of cheese and one silver drinking cup.

But just as the Dutch tulip buzz reaches its feverish crescendo in 1637, word of mouth suddenly turns negative. Rumours begin to spread that tulips are no longer worth the extraordinary amount people are paying for them. In a few short weeks, this negative word of mouth triggers a precipitous and dramatic crash in tulip prices- to less than a hundredth of their previous value. Because so many people have so much money tied up in tulips, the Great Tulip crash of 1637 virtually bankrupts the Netherlands, and for decades the country is often unable to pay for soldiers to defend its interests abroad. One such interest is the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, lying on the east coast of North America.

Without military defence, New Amsterdam lies open to attack, and in 1664 the English army march into the fledgling city and declare it their own without a single shot being fired, renaming it in honour of the English Duke of York. And that’s how a Dutch seventeenth century word of mouth craze for tulips resulted in the renaming- or rather naming- of New York.

Ref: Excerpt from Connected Marketing an Elsevier Publication