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.

Tourism in Africa was entangled with colonialism from the start. However, after the Second World War it became an integral part of the colonising powers’ development agenda, albeit one that has received little scholarly attention so far. This presented African states with a serious dilemma when most of them gained independence during the 1960s. On the one hand, tourism promised to stimulate economic growth, provide much needed foreign currency, and create employment opportunities. On the other hand, international tourism had the potential to threaten the economic independence of post-colonial states and perpetuate colonial stereotypes, as well as international and local power imbalances and inequalities. The newly elected governments had to deal with this “colonial baggage.” This article focusses on the transition from colonial to post-colonial tourism in two East African countries, Kenya and Tanzania. I explore how the late colonial government pursued tourism as a development strategy for the region. I also demonstrate how Kenya and Tanzania approached tourism and its colonial legacies in different ways after independence. To trace their respective tourism histories, I draw on published reports and newspaper articles, historical research literature, in particular, from tourism scholars of various disciplines, as well as archival sources.

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.

Caroline Dodds Pennock, Ned Blackhawk, and Esteban Mira Caballos published three paradigm-shifting works in 2023 that flip deeply ingrained narratives of Indigenous Americans’ presence at home in the hemispheric Americas and abroad in Europe. Pennock's book introduces scholarly shifts towards a global Indigenous presence and reframes Europe On Savage Shores where Indigenous travellers arrived on their own accord in largely forgotten encounters; Blackhawk reimagines official United States history which often omits Indigenous peoples by making them its moving force in The Rediscovery of America; and Mira Caballos conversely breaks down stereotypical attitudes toward Indigenous travellers in Spain by evincing their transatlantic journeys to Iberia in El Descubrimiento de Europa (The Discovery of Europe). All three works are mutually reinforcing in their mission to dismantle popular beliefs rooted in imaginative, racist, and antiquated narratives rather than historically verified reality. They are critical for both the academic and public transformation of the history of Indigenous peoples in Northern Europe, Iberia, and the United States. They propose a necessary and well-founded revision of their respective historiographic traditions, all originating from models predicated upon the paradigm of European discovery which these authors successfully turn on its head.

The 1850s and 1860s were a crucial era in the history of East Asia. The opening of treaty ports and advances in information and navigational technologies both generated new commercial opportunities and brought more people and commodities from Europe and America to East Asia. What were the consequences of these political and socioeconomic changes and the resultant spatial interconnections? I argue that spatial interconnections rendered centuries-old nonstate spaces in East Asia increasingly problematic, to the extent of creating international conflicts. To illustrate this, I reconstruct the mutual influence among places constructed by and shown in the lives of the shipwrecked American vessel Rover and its crew in East Asian waters. Their activities embodied how transpacific and East Asian communication and commerce, and the growing treaty port community in China, became entangled with how Taiwanese aborigines managed their interaction with the outside world. In this and similar borderland incidents, spatial interconnections between central and peripheral East Asia constructed by ordinary people crossing borders, and the problems arising from such interactions, led to the problematization of peripheries in the 1860s.

The field of Atlantic history initially focused exclusively on the Anglo-American North Atlantic, largely ignoring the South Atlantic and Africa. This approach, dominant after World War II, portrayed a “Western civilization” based on North Atlantic liberal values, akin to a postwar Mediterranean. Over time, historians of the Anglo-American Atlantic criticized this narrow focus, recognizing the broader interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Recent decades have seen a shift, with more historians acknowledging the Atlantic as a complex, interconnected space involving four continents. Particularly notable is the rise of studies on the South Atlantic, especially regarding science and empire in the Iberian world. These studies highlight the significant role of Spain and Portugal, challenging the previously North Atlantic-centered narrative. This research has revealed that the Atlantic world was as much, if not more, shaped by Spanish and Portuguese influences as by English ones. The reviewed works exemplify this shift, focusing on the South Atlantic's imperial entanglements and the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

This article describes the evolution of the commercial connections between China and the southern Sulawesian port of Makassar from the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1669, when the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie conquered Makassar. It attempts to show that these connections went through several transformations. Initially direct Chinese shipping supplied Makassar with Chinese goods, but this direct trade lasted only about a decade. However, commerce carried by Macanese ships and trade in Indochinese ports that were frequented by both Sulawesian and Chinese vessels maintained the commercial connection. This connection in its different forms allowed Makassar to act as an entrepôt that supplied Chinese goods and Japanese copper to more distant parts of Southeast Asia, especially those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The article concludes by arguing that after the conquest of Makassar, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo developed as a new regional entrepôt connecting China to the eastern archipelago.

Islands have played a much larger role in global history than their small size may suggest. The study of islands, once a part of maritime history, has since 2006 grown into its own interdisciplinary field of “island studies.” The three books analysed in this review all stand to contribute to the new field. The books under review are The Boundless Sea (2019), A World at Sea (2020), and África y sus islas (2021). Island-specific topics advanced by these books include islands as nodes in trade networks, the detrimental influence of colonisation on island environments, the use of islands as locations to escape from slavery, ethnographic descriptions of islands, and indigenous knowledge produced by islanders.