Abstract
Tourism today accounts for nearly 10 per cent of gross domestic product worldwide and, for well over a century, has shaped the way people understand national and cultural difference in an increasingly interdependent world. And yet historians have largely left the study of tourism to anthropologists and economists. There are a number of excellent local and national studies on tourism history, but it remains a small field that is all too often disconnected from broader historiographical debates over consumption, capitalism, and modernity.
Eric Zuelow's A History of Modern Tourism aims to showcase and synthesize this emerging sub-field and to give tourism its due as an engine of historical change. Tourism, he argues, has ‘deep connections to virtually every aspect of the human experience’ (p. x) – from culture and aesthetics to health to the natural and built environments. Moreover, Zuelow writes, ‘To study modern tourism is to study the modern age’ (p. x).
Zuelow effectively demonstrates the cultural and economic links between tourism and modernity. Modern tourism – as opposed to simply travel or migration – coincided with the rise of global capitalism and was a form of travel defined by the ‘pursuit of pleasure and … an escape from everyday realities’ (p. 9). Although wealthy ancient Romans travelled for pleasure, it was the British who invented most of the tropes and institutions that characterize tourism as we know it today, among them national transit infrastructures, package tours, and the idea that travel is good for people's spiritual and physical health. All of this was connected to broader modernizing forces in British society that soon spread elsewhere: accelerating technological change, rapid urbanization and class formation, and the rise of the nation-state.
Most notably, tourism both enabled, and was made possible by, breakthroughs in transportation that collapsed time and space and transformed the ways in which people lived and moved in the world. In the nineteenth century, the steamship and the railway stitched nations together and to each other. In the twentieth, automobiles and airplanes created a market for mass tourism that allowed people across the class spectrum to enjoy touristic experiences, from weekend jaunts to an amusement park to extravagant holidays on remote tropical islands. Thanks to such easy mobility, by the end of the last century, tourism had gone from being ‘the purview of a very few to being the obsession of nearly all’ (13).
Tourism also underwrote notions of modern selfhood. Beginning with the Grand Tour, in which British aristocrats visited Europe for an education in both history and corporeal pursuits, modern tourism offered ‘a license to move outside of social norms’ (28). As the Western world abandoned feudalism and old social hierarchies, tourism provided a mechanism for new modes of self-fashioning. Being a tourist necessarily involved breaking out of old patterns of living. Where once leaving one's home community was something to be feared, an endeavour reserved for professional travellers such as traders or sailors, the whole point of tourism was to seek entertainment and adventure in the unfamiliar. It drew on Enlightenment ideas of individualism and Romantic notions of authentic experience. Tourism helped promote the widely held beliefs that novelty and knowledge of other cultures were key to being a modern person.
Zuelow's book is impressive in scope. As editor of the Journal of Tourism History, he is well-perched to survey the field and highlight its discoveries and insights. Indeed, the reader is treated to a ‘best of’ tour of the literature and of tourism history. Illuminating anecdotes engage the reader throughout. In one, Thomas Cook, a devout Baptist, popularized the package tour with the initial goal of promoting temperance, but a pitfall-ridden trip to Scotland led travellers to the bottle and Cook to abandon his teetotal mission. With its bird's-eye perspective, the book will be particularly useful as a spine for any syllabus on the history of tourism. It also helps to situate tourism case studies in global context, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the tourism economy and the ideologies behind it.
The scope of the book, however, is also one of its weaknesses. Clocking in at under 200 pages, such a wide-ranging study will necessarily leave out more than it can cover. It is, by the author's admission, a Eurocentric work, weighted heavily toward Britain and toward the nineteenth century. Still, one wishes it had been either narrower or broader. Major themes in tourism history – such as the relationships among tourism, colonialism, and new racial hierarchies – are glossed over in a narrative that moves at the clip of a speeding train. At the same time, there are places where Zuelow devotes too much space to developments that seem tangential, such as the technological innovations that allowed said train to speed.
Zuelow owns his omissions, saying that the book's word count did not allow room to ‘delve into the various scholarly debates’(x). But the lack of attention to debates means that the story he presents appears both inevitable and unproblematic. While Zuelow discusses the ways in which tourism could fuel racism and nationalism, particularly in colonial and fascist contexts, there is a general tone of celebration and progress that runs throughout. There are many critical studies of tourism's impact on local economies, on the power dynamics that shape tourism, and on the consequences for the human objects of the ‘tourist gaze’. But these are sidelined in Zuelow's synthesis in favour of an account told from the perspective of the traveller (usually white and male) enjoying all the new liberties and pleasures that tourism promised – experiences often denied to tourism workers themselves.