Read on Twitter
Looking over some recent work on history of #tourism and #travelwriting I’m once again struck by the question: can you really write about 19thC tourism without thinking seriously about empire and colonization?
The literature still suggests yes, but I’m not so sure. THREAD:
The literature still suggests yes, but I’m not so sure. THREAD:
(Pic a detail from a photograph of the Borobudur by Woodbury and Page ca. 1866. Leiden Digital Collections, KITLV 408095: http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:844525.
Yes, the Borobudur used to have a big covered viewing platform on top for tourists. Also a Dutch flag.)
Yes, the Borobudur used to have a big covered viewing platform on top for tourists. Also a Dutch flag.)
There are lots of accounts from colonial officials, settlers etc. who stopped by at Paris or Naples for a spot of sight-seeing or toured the pyramids en route to Asia. And surprise, they didn’t just magically stop doing tourism once they reached the Indian Ocean.
Travel - between metropolis and colony, within and between colonies - was an essential facet of the business of colonisation. Lots of it was “touristic”, even if lacking a full-grown tourist industry. (And those industries probably started out earlier than you’d think, too!)
There’s resistance to using the terminology in colonial contexts. Fore some, it sounds too frivolous (fair!); for the Grand Tour people it can feel far-fetched. Lots of people just think it’s anachronistic, because that’s the received wisdom.
One of the comments I got on my PhD thesis was “can you really even talk about tourism in 19thC SE Asia?” To which the answer is pretty simple: well they sure did at the time! As threat (of destabilization) and opportunity (for economic and/or cultural gains); as present reality.
Lots of debate about incipient tourism in the colonial presses from at least the 1840s on, touching on freedom of movement, settler projects, archaeology and heritage, colonial domesticity – basically every facet of colonisation. Tourism is all of that. Also in Europe!
Sure, the precise meaning of the term has changed over time but if you want to understand the development of the phenomenon, you probably want to be looking at the edge cases, the margins where it was spreading and adjusting to new, different circumstances.
Tourism is a great little case study and window into how the cultural artefact that is 19thC/middle-class/nationalist/liberal/whatever EUROPE (you know the one) is a product of empire and can’t be understood separately from it. We all know that, and yet…
I’ve made these points before as have many others before me, it’s nothing revolutionary. But the status quo changes very slowly. Why? I think primarily because of disciplinary boundaries and institutional inertia, funding streams, narrow ideas of available sources etc.
