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Afterword: Tourism and Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2024

Eric G. E. Zuelow*
Affiliation:
University of New England, Biddeford, ME, United States

Abstract

This afterword provides a critical examination of the historical connections between tourism and empire. To contextualise this discussion, a concise overview is provided of the history of tourism, its entanglements with empire and expansion into a truly global industry in the modern era. This is followed by an analysis that draws on the articles making up this special issue in order to highlight their contributions and connections to the most recent wider literature and in particular the significant themes raised that have thus far been underrepresented in the nascent historiography on tourism and empire. The afterword finishes by providing a strong argument for the necessity of continuing this line of investigation further, with a particular emphasis on the need to understand the double role of tourism as both an instrument of imperial oppression, as well as a site of localised forms of agency and contestation.

Type
Afterword
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History

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References

1 Eric G. E. Zuelow, ‘Tourism, Nations, and Nationalism,’ in Eric G. E. Zuelow and Kevin J. James (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Tourism and Travel, (online ed., Oxford Academic, 21 June). 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190889555.013.27, accessed 25 Jan. 2024.

2 Wigley, Andrew, “Against the Wind: the Role of Belgian Colonial Tourism Marketing in Resisting Pressure to Decolonize from Africa,” Journal of Tourism History 7:3 (2015), 193209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Kennedy, Dane, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, University of California, 1996)Google Scholar; Jennings, Eric T., Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

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5 Kathleen R. Epelde, “Travel Guidebooks to India: A Century and a Half of Orientalism,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wollongong, 2004); Pratt, M. Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Second Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

6 For example: Chabloz, Nadège, “Tourism and Primitivism: Initiation to bwiti and iboga in Gabon,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 193/4, nos 1–2 (January 2009): 391–428Google Scholar; Furlough, Ellen, “Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 441–473CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dulucq, Sopie, “Discovering the African Soul: Difficulties Faced by Cultural Tourism in French Colonial Africa (1920s-1950s), Cahiers d’Études Africaines 193/4, nos 1–2 (January 2009): 27–48Google Scholar; and Jennings, Eric T., Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

7 For example: Hom, Stephanie Malia, “Empires of tourism: travel and rhetoric in Italian colonial Libya and Albania, 1911–1943, Journal of Tourism History 4, No. 3 (November 2012): 281–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bosworth, R.J.B., “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of Totalitarian Culture,” Contemporary European History 6, No. 1 (March 1997): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 The following represents a key moment in the flowering of scholarship exploring the importance of empire tourism (to which this special issue promises a significant contribution): Baranowski, Shelley et al. “Tourism and empire,” Journal of Tourism History, 7, no. 1–2 (April-August, 2015): 100–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 See also: Laith Shakir, “ ‘A land made fit for tourists’: Thomas Cook, tourism promotion, and colonial development in Iraq, 1920–1932” Journal of Tourism History 16:2 (August 2024), 133–150.

12 Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 13–16. See also: Catherine Cocks, Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

13 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992, 2008), 3, 8.

14 Maurizio Peleggi recounts less deadly forms of resistance by tourism workers who engaged in theft, gossip about guests, physical confrontations, and threats while working at hotels in Singapore and British Columbo. See “The social and Material Live of Colonial Hotels: Comfort Zones as Contact Zones in British Columbo and Singapore, ca. 1870–1930,” Journal of Social History 46:1 (October 2012), 144.

15 Todd Cleveland, Alluring Opportunities: Tourism, Empire, and African Labor in Colonial Mozambique (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023), 28–9.

16 Paraphrased by Dane Kennedy in The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 16.

17 John Darwin, ‘Empire and ethnicity’, Nations and Nationalism 16:3 (July 2010), 384.

18 Crispin Branfoot, “Painting processions: The social and religious landscape of Southern India in a ‘Company’ album”, Orientations 38 (November/December 2007), 76 and 78.

19 Eric G. E. Zuelow, “Negotiating National Identity Through Tourism in Colonial South Asia and Beyond,” in The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism eds Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D'Auria, and Aviel Roshwald, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 640–660.

20 Blake C. Scott, “Revolution at the hotel: Panama and luxury travel in the age of decolonisation,” Journal of Tourism History, 10:2 (August 2018), 149–150.

21 Black C. Scott, Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2022), 74, 137. Also see note #15 above.

22 Cleveland, Alluring Opportunities, 134–138

23 Zuelow, “Negotiating”, 654–658.

24 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 202–222

25 Cleveland, Alluring Opportunities, 10–11.

26 Maurizio Peleggi, (2005), “Consuming colonial nostalgia: The monumentalisation of historic hotels in urban South-East Asia,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 46:3 (December 2005), 255–265.

27 Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, “Consuming colonial nostalgia in Kolkata, India,” Annals of Tourism Research 95 (July 2022).

28 Gethin Chamberlain, “Tourists in India Told to Avoid ‘Human Safaris,’ ” Telegraph, 11 September 2015.

29 Dennison Nash, “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism,” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, 2nd edition, ed. Valene L. Smith, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 37–54; Freya Higgins-Desboilles, “The ongoingness of imperialism: the problem of tourism dependency and the promise of radical equality,” Annals of Tourism Research 94 (May 2022).

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31 Furlough, Irene, “Frederick W. Crossley: Irish Turn-of-the-Century Tourism Pioneer,” Irish History: A Research Yearbook, No. 2 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 162–76Google Scholar.

32 Zuelow, Eric G. E., Making Ireland Irish: Irish Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

33 Fonseca, Stanley, “Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism. By Blake C. Scott,” Journal of Social History 56:4 (Summer 2023)Google Scholar.