Colonial Baggage: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction revisits the relevant literature in the fields of tourism history, as well as in imperial/global history. Identifying shortcomings in these two research strands, the authors advocate bringing themes and approaches from both historiographical fields into dialogue. They outline the intersections between the development of modern tourism since the mid-nineteenth century and the global expansion of empires over the same time period and identify three important themes in the entangled history of tourism and imperialism: tourism's relationship with colonial infrastructure and development; the contested labour relations underpinning colonial tourism; and tourism as a site of encounters between colonisers and the colonised, as well as of touristic gazes and counter-gazes. Finally, the introduction also situates the individual contributions of the special issue within this broader historiographical framework and indicates how they can show the way towards a fuller understanding of the workings of modern empires and imperialism.

Tourism has been an unequal industry since its beginnings. The ability to tour the world for recreation has always depended on global hierarchies, and nowhere has this been clearer than in the imperial and colonial contexts that first established tourism as a global industry in the late nineteenth century. From hill stations in South Asia to photo safaris in East Africa, tourist travel worked to create and reinforce patterns of inclusion and exclusion between colonisers and the colonised wherever occupied land was turned into travel destinations. This special issue provides the first investigation of the entangled histories of tourism and empire on a global level, dating from the era of “new imperialism” to decolonisation and covering a range of geographies including East Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. Using thematically connected case studies from this broad range of historical and geographical settings, the special issue's overarching aim is twofold: first, to critically assess the “colonial baggage” of tourism, by which we mean its deep embeddedness, both now and before, in imperialist practices and structures. Second, to demonstrate that tourism, far from being a mere curiosity in the history of empires, played a crucial role in shaping imperial and trans-imperial relations around the world.

A Brief History of Tourism¹

Historically, tourism and other forms of travel have often gone hand in hand, blending into each other and making sharp categorical distinctions difficult. Medieval pilgrims visited sacred places with a distinct purpose but engaged in practices similar to those of later tourists, including souvenir shopping.² Military campaigns allowed occupiers to visit new places and, in doing so, enjoy sightseeing activities.³ In the wake of colonial conquest around the world there followed scores of explorers and anthropologists, all with a genuine interest in seeing and experiencing their destinations. As Edward Said famously pointed out, Napoleon's Egyptian expedition of 1798 created much of the western world's knowledge about the “Orient” and in this way also defined the sites to be consumed by tourists.⁴

Pilgrims, scientists, soldiers, or colonial officials thus often became “incidental tourists” during their various tours, to use a term coined by Gordon Pirie, but there is also another, more focused history of travelling for the express purpose of leisure.⁵ This form of modern western tourism is conventionally traced back to the Grand Tour, a coming-of-age ritual for many Northern European elites during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had much to do with international politics and evolving diplomacy. The growing complexity of governments and expanding trade networks during the early modern period necessitated a new approach to engagement with foreign states that demanded a new class of diplomat: fluent in multiple languages, conversant with differing cultures, and deeply familiar with their counterparts abroad. To create the necessary skillset, England's Elizabeth I offered to pay her country's best and brightest to spend time abroad. Others soon wanted to join in. Parents sent their children on extended foreign tours, to attain social cachet, develop good taste, and perhaps even expand their understanding of the world around them.

Modern tourism eventually emerged from the Grand Tour through a broadening of the travelling demographics and a simultaneous chipping away of some of the travel programme's more high-minded goals.⁶ Towards the end of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of middle-class travellers across Western Europe were engaging in shorter and more frivolous “pleasure trips.”⁷ In the nineteenth, full-fledged tourist industries began to take shape. There were many who were appalled by this new type of travel and derided it at every opportunity: critique of tourism and its seemingly formulaic experiences (“tourist traps”) is as old as the industry itself and endures to this day. Remarkably, it is not only the visited who utter it, but often the tourists themselves, touting themselves as more knowledgeable and morally superior to their fellow visitors.⁸ The sociologist John Urry has famously described what many of those portraying themselves as travellers-not-tourists criticise: places are transformed into sights and the tourists’ gazes, that is the visual consumption of these place, seek an ideal representation so that “much tourism becomes in effect a search for the photogenic.”⁹ In the process, local specificity gets flattened out. As Dean MacCannell has pointed out, modern tourism is a totalising project, seeking to bring the diversity and variety of the world under a unified experiential framework for the consumption of the tourist; even if superficially cherishing difference, that project is inherently one of subordination.¹⁰ As a vehicle of globalised modernity, tourism has always been a form of empire-making.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several coterminous developments converged to expand the practice of leisure travel and to create the conditions of possibility for its close connection to empire. The Grand Tour was a predominantly urban phenomenon, but by the middle of the eighteenth century there was a revolution in aesthetics that increasingly drew people to rural areas. Edmund Burke's notion of the “sublime and beautiful” merged with new ideas about the healthful benefits of cold bathing, developing ideas about geology and natural science, new themes in Dutch landscape painting, and even with new ways that cartographers mapped space to make mountains and beaches desirable. Landscape became a tourist attraction, not just as a sight but also as a venue for a range of outdoor sporting activities, with mountaineering leading the way. The Alps rapidly developed into a major destination in the nineteenth century; the first Alpine Club was formed by the British in 1857.¹¹

The early nineteenth century ushered in the industrial age. New technologies were invented. Steam made it possible to power industry, but also to propel transport, first on water and then on land.¹² Trains and steamships could move people through the landscape, teaching them about the power of the state and the benefits of empire both for the metropole and its colonies. It was Thomas Cook who famously employed the new steam power for an organised train tour between Leicester and Loughborough in 1841, the foundation of his business empire. A few decades later, Thomas Cook & Son had become the world's premier travel agency and its destinations included India and Palestine where tour operations started in 1869. In Egypt, the Cook agency ran passenger services on the Nile. These steamboats became central in the British war against the Mahdi in 1884, when Cook & Son were contracted to transport soldiers and supplies to the Sudanese border.¹³ By the turn of the century, the company had brought 12,000 tourists to Palestine, “Cook's Crusaders” as the Punch called them.¹⁴ Yet tourism was still far from a mass phenomenon: in 1899, Cook demanded 1,125 U.S. dollars for an excursion from the United States to Palestine and Egypt, including a Nile voyage, which compared to an average U.S. annual salary of 438 U.S. dollars at the time. Moreover, hardly anybody had the required fifteen weeks of vacation to spare.¹⁵

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, publishers capitalised on both the new type of tourists and the thousands of would-be-travellers. Murray, Baedecker, as much as Thomas Cook's own guidebook series informed people on what to see and how to see it. A range of sights and sites filled the pages, complete with practical information about how to get there and careful descriptions of what to do upon arrival. Guidebooks informed readers about the past, explained cultural traditions. They told actual travellers where to stand when looking at a given view and in this way also provided armchair travellers at home with a “virtual reality.”¹⁶ On the surface there was little overtly political about this, but only on the surface. Guidebooks had the power to tell insiders what it meant to belong or not, they instructed people how to recognise and understand difference.¹⁷ Tourists craved dissimilarity. Seeking to escape the everyday, it was the “exotic” that fascinated them, and travel agencies and guidebooks nurtured this desire through their exoticising – and often eroticising – representations of the “Orient,” Africa, or South Sea paradises. White tourists wanted to gaze at those who were not like them and to experience landscapes that were unfamiliar.¹⁸ They yearned to cross borders but, at the same time, those borders were increasingly becoming a way of imagining and explaining difference, all the more so in colonial contexts.¹⁹

The rise of tourism to a global industry thus paralleled the pervasive territorial expansion and administrative consolidation of colonial empires in the same period. Both processes depended on the same technologies as vectors: steamships, railways, and telegraph cables, and both needed the rise of the mass media to create desire and stimulate the “imperialist imagination.”²⁰ The consumption and extraction at the heart of colonial tourism both drew on clear racial and cultural divides between mobile whites and supposedly immobile “natives.” Ultimately, the tourist experience depended on the colonial security apparatus's ability to uphold these boundaries: the domesticated consumption of empires required their policing.

Tourism and Empire

Given these implications, in a pioneering round table discussion, published in the Journal of Tourism History in 2015, all discussants agreed that “[e]mpire has enabled the spread of tourism and tourism has extended and reinforced empire,” as panellist Shelley Baranowski phrased it.²¹ Yet, even with these evident entanglements between imperial and tourist practices, historians have been slow to get to work: as Eric G.E. Zuelow observed in 2016, “despite separate and growing literatures on tourism and empire, historians have yet to systematically explore connections between the two.”²² Since then, scholars with a particular focus on tourism have increasingly paid attention to the role of empire in the leisure industry. A leading authority in tourism history, Zuelow himself has played an important role in this as the editor of both the Journal of Tourism History and the freshly launched Cornell University Press book series Histories and Cultures of Tourism, both of which have notably centred on imperial geographies in recent years.²³

While empire has thus become a critical category in historical tourism studies, scholars of imperial and colonial history, for their part, have only reluctantly engaged with historic tourist activities, perhaps out of sensitivity to the supposed frivolity of the subject matter: associated with light-hearted activities, the phenomenon can appear to be an awkward fit within the predominantly violent and coercive context of colonialism. Consequently, the list of studies that have offered thorough analyses of leisure travel as an important facet of imperialism remains short.²⁴ Among the notable pioneers in this field is Colette Zytnicki, who in her analysis of tourism in colonial Algeria has convincingly argued that French authorities deliberately utilised it as a “source of wealth and a potent tool of development” beneficial to the empire “on the ideological as well as the economic plane,” creating an inextricable entanglement between leisure travel and imperial politics.²⁵ More recently, Kate McDonald, in her study of the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism, has similarly made a case for seeing tourism as a “technology par excellence for producing firsthand experiences and representations of the space of the nation and of the colonies as spaces within it” – that is, as a vehicle for legitimising and normalising imperial rule.²⁶

While tourism is not her primary focus, Kris Alexanderson echoes that argument in her work on the maritime dimension of the Dutch Empire, presenting Dutch ocean liners with their Indonesian staff as “colonial classrooms” in which European passengers could adjust to the routines and hierarchies of life in the colonies.²⁷ Writing about hotels in the colonial world, Maurizio Peleggi has described them in similar terms as “microcosms of empire,” where empire was consumed but which also made colour lines blur in that non-white elites could establish themselves as patrons and thus participate.²⁸ One of the editors of this special issue has also discussed how Dutch authorities sought – not always successfully – to make use of foreign celebrity tourists as vehicles for the dissemination of controlled, positive narratives of the empire to international audiences.²⁹ Elsewhere, Trevor Simmons, in his dissertation, has focused on the growth of Kenya's safari industry from 1900 through the interwar years and has not only illuminated the economic significance of tourism for the colonial purse but also the business's complete reliance on African wage-earners.³⁰ Likewise, studying the British in Africa, Gordon Pirie has dealt with the expansion of infrastructure for air transport in the 1920s and 1930s.³¹

Interestingly, the most thorough engagement with the entangled histories of empire and tourism has come from students of an empire that has often been overlooked in classical analyses: the United States of America. As everywhere, the rise of the American tourism industry coincided with the era of “new imperialism” and with the United States acquiring vast overseas possessions during and after the Spanish-American War of 1898. From a mere 35,000 American vacationists going abroad in 1870, the annual number rose to 250,000 by 1914.³² Historians have not only pointed to the many informal imperial ties with Latin America resulting from this seasonal mobility but also revealed the importance of tourism for governing the United States’ formal empire. “Travel and tourism,” Christine Skwiot observed, “helped legitimate a variety of different political, racial, and social regimes in Hawai'i and Cuba and stabilize relations between capital and labor.”³³ Tourism popularised the American imperial project, for instance, by advertising Puerto Rico as a winter refuge, co-financing the project, and providing a reason to extend the island's administration and infrastructure.³⁴ Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, writing on the Pacific region, thus remarked that it was “tourism and militarism's mutual work [that] produce[d] the possibilities for American historical and contemporary dominance.”³⁵

It appears, then, that the historiography on the entangled history of tourism and empire is slowly expanding. The individual contributions mentioned, though limited to their specific national or imperial contexts, have started to stake out a space for deeper analyses of colonial tourism but have yet to cohere into a global and connected research agenda. By and large, tourism remains a blind spot within wider analyses of imperialism and its histories. It is true that specific cases such as the safari businesses of colonial East Africa or the tourist reinvention of Bali in the Dutch East Indies appear regularly in the literature; most often, however, historians have tended to frame these cases as illustrative asides rather than as objects of substantive analysis, as a curiosity rather than colonial practice.³⁶ This ignorance is particularly striking in global history writing, a field that counts mobility among its most important and characteristic objects of study. In it, leisure travel has largely been sidelined in favour of more individualistic, exploratory, and scientific forms of travel, on the one hand, or more large-scale analyses of migration and diasporas, on the other. By way of example, the seminal volume A World Connecting: 1870–1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg, dedicates merely three of its more than one thousand pages to “mass tourism,” a fraction wildly out of sync with the economic, social, and cultural importance of tourism in the modern age.³⁷

With this special issue, we seek to reveal the deep and sometimes surprising significance of tourism in histories of empire, in an effort to popularise its study among global and imperial historians, who have too often overlooked the phenomenon. The six articles that make up the issue discuss cases of colonial tourism from the British, Dutch, and American empires, ranging in time from the late nineteenth century all the way to decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s. The mutual centre of their interest is the many entanglements between tourism and empire, the “mutual work,” as Gonzalez called it. A close analysis of colonial tourism, the articles show, is uniquely suited to interrogating the close intertwinement of the various economic, cultural, military, and political facets of empire-making, as well as the multidirectional connections between high-level decision-making, popular engagement with, and everyday experiences of empire. To this end, the authors critically interrogate three little-explored aspects of leisure travel in colonial contexts: the interdependence of tourism and colonial development; the workers of the tourist industry, and the tourist experience on the colonial scene. Each of the contributions addresses one or more of these topics, as outlined in the following paragraphs. An emphasis on these three themes and the ways in which they manifested themselves in different colonial contexts at different times provides this special issue with a research agenda that can serve as a guide for future analyses.

Tourism as Development

The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed an infrastructure boom. When steam power came to rule the seas, Messageries Maritimes, Peninsular & Oriental, and other highly subsidised companies developed steamship lines to connect metropoles and overseas dependencies and ensure the transfer of mail, people, and products within this imperial sphere.³⁸ Less than half a century later, shipping companies were joined by state-sponsored airlines, which aimed to speed up these global connections. By the eve of the Second World War, 400,000 kilometres of air routes spanned the globe, connecting Amsterdam and Jakarta, London and Karachi, and San Francisco and Honolulu, for example.³⁹ Within colonial territories, public works departments simultaneously extended railroad tracks and motorways.⁴⁰ The link between these modes of transportation and colonial tourism has occasionally been made in recent history writing; Catherine Cocks, for example, has argued that “[p]leasure travel was integral to this plan [of infrastructure extension], not an afterthought or a by-product.”⁴¹

Strongly substantiating Cocks's claim, the contributions to this special issue show that such new infrastructure systems were a prerequisite of tourist travel, yet they also explore the extent to which tourism shaped and directed the development of these systems. Elliott Sturtevant's contribution looks at the operations of the United Fruit Company in the Caribbean, where the company's fleet transported not only bananas but also North American tourists in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Sturtevant shows that vacationists were a welcome cargo aboard the otherwise empty southbound ships of the United Fruit Company before they returned to the United States fully loaded with fruit. Sturtevant gives a fresh perspective on the linkages between these seemingly distinct economic activities by focusing on the infrastructural arrangements that the two types of cargo had in common: both needed cool air. As much as bananas required refrigeration to prevent them from rotting before delivery, tourists felt that they could only consume the tropics by protecting their bodies against the warm climate. People and goods, Sturtevant observes, were thus ferried along the same distribution network, making the United Fruit Company's infrastructure one of leisure and of imperialist resource extraction at the same time.

Laith Shakir's contribution focuses on a novel technology that transformed transportation in the interwar period: the airplane. Examining the development of British civil aviation in Iraq, Shakir shows that the profits of transferring tourists made imperial lines more viable not just on the seas but also in the air. Shakir illuminates the imperial roots of air travel by showing how the extension of infrastructure for air travel was driven by a cooperation of the British government, the Royal Air Force, and the subsidised commercial airline Imperial Airways. Complementing Sturtevant's analysis of the economic, cross-sector logic of tourist expansion, Shakir highlights the military importance of tourist infrastructure and its capacity to undergird the projection of military power. On an ideological level, Shakir shows how passengers on scheduled and chartered flights were offered new opportunities to consume Middle Eastern landscapes from the air, a perspective that became connected with both the ancient—and allegedly backward—character of the region and the developmentalist potential of British infrastructure extension.

Dörte Lerp's study of tourism in Eastern Africa exemplifies how post-independent states sought to engage with the remnants of colonial tourism as a development strategy. Lerp studies the trajectories of tourism in Kenya and Tanzania from the late colonial phase through the early years of independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the East African Tourist Travel Association, an agency that developed a distinct tourism strategy for the world region, Lerp demonstrates that the transition of tourism from a colonial to a post-colonial business was quite difficult in both states. In Tanzania, a socialist country, the government built a nationalised tourism sector with limited success. In neighbouring Kenya, the United Nations urged the newly independent state to foster the safari industry, but Africans were mostly excluded from its profits. Lerp thus assesses each government's ability to incorporate colonial structures into its own young economy.

Tourism as Labour

Colonial history writing in the past twenty years or so has devoted a lot of attention to indigenous agency, meaning the ability of those living under a colonial regime to follow their own agendas and carve out better lives for themselves. Exploring the leverage colonial workers held is particularly fruitful in the context of the young tourism industry, which opened up new social and financial opportunities to them. Peddlers in tourist hubs began to sell seemingly authentic art to unknowing visitors, from Hawai'ian leis to African masks. Hotel resorts promised a steady source of income to servants, cooks, and cleaners. Men and women also offered their services as guides, interpreters, and porters. A look at tourist itineraries makes clear that the precursor of colonial tourism was not the European Grand Tour but scientific and military exploration. Tourism workers were often the sole mobilisers in an otherwise hostile and impassable environment. Being go-betweens and intermediaries between European or American tourists and host societies, the workers of imperial tourism negotiated their own position between the global and local flows of empire.⁴²

Understanding tourist attractions as worksites, the contributions explore what motivated people to choose a profession in the tourism sector and what their everyday experience looked like. Tourism workers, all authors agree, were not mere victims of the colonial situation but often actively chose to work in the business and, despite obvious and sometimes daunting power imbalances, managed also to shape tourist agendas to their own liking and/or benefit. These actions and interactions are brought particularly into focus by Susie Protschky's contribution, which zooms in on Indonesian volcanoes as sites of tourist activities before the First World War. Protschky illuminates the often unspoken importance of Javanese porters and camp servants in this business through a meticulous analysis of photographs and related material. Only photography possesses the ability to make these otherwise silenced actors and actions visible; by reading photographic sources “against the grain,” Protschky discusses these workers’ agency and ability to negotiate the terms of their employment.

Arnout van der Meer's contribution similarly focuses on early-twentieth-century Java but on a different sector of its rapidly growing tourist economy. Together with transport infrastructure systems, which made the tropics accessible, sites were developed into tourist resorts, providing new sources of income for colonial entrepreneurs and authorities. A network of mountain resorts provided both European residents and visiting globetrotters an escape from the tropical heat of the low-lying coastal areas. Maintaining the illusion of a white haven required Indonesian servants to be docile and as invisible as possible. However, as Van der Meer shows, the mountain resorts developed into a site of contestation between European hotel owners and increasingly assertive local workers, whose resilience was soon discussed in terms of an anti-colonial struggle. Like Protschky's piece on the same territory, the article underlines the dual nature of tourism that set strenuous activity (mountaineering) against leisure (luxurious hotels) as two complementary sides of colonial recreation, both underpinned by essential yet sometimes ambiguous relations with local labour.

The argument for tourism as a site of indigenous agency is particularly evident in Candida Keithley's contribution, which explores the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century tourist reinvention of Whakarewarewa, a Māori village on the North Island of New Zealand, whose residents—especially its women—transformed their home into an attraction. Outlining the land dispossession struggles the local community endured during that time, Keithley illuminates how village women capitalised on visitors’ gazes. They offered guided walks across the village and sold souvenirs while children jumped from high cliffs into a stream and dived for coins. Monetising their visitors’ interest in indigenous culture, Keithley shows, the villagers of Whakarewarewa turned colonial tourism into a lucrative business that helped them challenge their dispossession and retain control over the land, as well as how it tended to be depicted.

Tourism as Consumption

Tourist travel has always been about the consumption of places and people. Each tourist's individual experience is serial in nature in that itineraries, visited attractions, and gazes—recorded in photo albums and on social media profiles—all resemble one another. In his influential book The Tourist Gaze, John Urry suggested that “[p]laces are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. […] The tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience.”⁴³ In colonial contexts, the question of who directed these gazes, however, is often less clear than one might expect; nor is it clear that the tourist's vision, even when underpinned by colonial authority, always had primacy.

This inherent ambiguity of tourist visualities is explored in different ways by the authors of this special issue. Laith Shakir demonstrates that British travel agencies in the 1920s and early 1930s revamped orientalist depictions of the Middle East as the land of Arabian Nights to sell Imperial Airways’ new commercial London–Baghdad route to vacationists. The view from the cabin window, he shows, was advertised as a whole new gaze upon the long-known ancient wonders of the Holy Land and Iraq, a top-down reinvention of empire as a visual experience. Yet matters were rarely as simple as that, as Susie Protschky's analysis of the photographer-tourist's gaze reveals. The closeness of the tour group opened up fissures in racial and class hierarchies, leaving space for unexpected intimacies. The photographs document these ambiguities in the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, reframing volcanic slopes as sites of boundary transgression within otherwise strictly drawn colonial hierarchies. Another sight, Van der Meer's contribution shows, threatened to undermine the aesthetic manifestation of those self-same hierarchies at Java's elite mountain resorts: that of Javanese guests. When the resorts became a desirable destination for socially upwardly mobile Javanese elites, their presence in these socio-culturally European-coded leisure spaces led to scandal and outrage among the white guests.⁴⁴

That sense of instability in the very structures of power that the colonial tourist industry was intended to uphold is also evident in Lerp's tracing of the often problematic wholesale reclaiming of tourist visualities, including those of the photographic safari, by national governments in postcolonial states. And, crucially, Keithley's study of Māori tourist guides demonstrates that gazes were not unilaterally employed by tourists on locals, but that those who were gazed upon played a decisive role in shaping the tourist experience. The residents of Whakarewarewa staged authenticity for visitors and guided them along a mental map of what they deemed legitimate to see, retaining control over their representation and influencing which narratives about their lives would circulate in the wider world. All these contributions complicate the concept of the “tourist gaze” by illuminating that the roles of visitor and visited were not always easily divided along colonial hierarchies and that it was seldom obvious who gazed first and who gazed back.

Outlook

Taken together, the articles set out to demonstrate that both spatially and temporally, tourism provides an innovative yet profound insight into imperial history. With the selected case studies testifying to the ubiquity of the phenomenon in different world regions and across different empires, the special issue makes it abundantly clear that tourism is an ideal subject for future research on the “connected histories of empire,” to borrow the phrase of Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, that is, new histories that transcend the framework of singular imperial formations and foreground the many linkages and exchanges across their borders.⁴⁵ Tracking the movements of colonial middle classes, the history of colonial tourism also fits in naturally with recent historiography on European empires as fundamentally transnational entities that drew and depended on mobile reserves of international labour, mercenaries, experts, and settlers.⁴⁶ Some of that literature has, however, been hampered by an excessive focus on individual life-stories, whether those of adventurous travellers or of singular imperial careerists, that do little to disclose deeper, structural connections. Tourism, by contrast, was by definition a mass phenomenon and thus provides a fresh research focus on mobilities that were necessarily systemic and fundamentally repetitive, tracing and reinforcing lasting trajectories within and between empires.

Global from its inception, the tourism industry represents an ideal framework for understanding the border-crossing dimensions of European imperialism. Yet, a careful analysis of colonial tourism, as undertaken by the contributions to this special issue, can also do more. It leads to fascinating insights not just into yet another subset of imperial mobilities but into the very logic behind the construction of such connectivities: it unearths the intertwined economic, political, military, and cultural rationales that worked to move people from metropole to colony and back while simultaneously foregrounding the constrained but real agency of indigenous workers at local sites. It also becomes clear that these rationales and dynamics are far from being consigned to the past: ultimately, looking at empire through the lens of tourism also points forward into our time. Today, former colonies are among the preferred international destinations. Many postcolonial states have inherited the complicated structures of colonial tourism, as Lerp shows in her article, and forms of consumption already common in colonial times persist.⁴⁷

With many Global South countries being particularly attractive to those tourists not seeking just beach resorts but “cultural tourism” – engagement with the host culture, its heritage, and nature – the stereotypical depiction of timelessness and primitivity, often represented as synonymous with authenticity, abounds. Many of these destinations still suffer from the exoticisation and exploitation of both natural resources and people, with sex tourism perhaps its most extreme manifestation. Moreover, the embers of empire glow not only in the former colonies, but also the metropoles: as Stephen L. Harp has recently illuminated, it was North African labour that constructed the tourist infrastructure of the French Riviera in the decades following the Second World War.⁴⁸ The (neo-)imperiality of tourism, its “colonial baggage,” haunts today's destinations, highlighting the need for a critical reassessment of its past; and the manifold continuities between colonial-era and present-day tourist itineraries show how such an analysis can be an important vehicle for reassessing the twenty-first-century legacies of empire, including those embedded in our own travel practices.