In their introduction, Andreas Greiner and Mikko Toivanen express their objective for this special issue: to critically assess the “ ‘colonial baggage’ of tourism” and to “demonstrate that tourism, far from being a mere curiosity, played a crucial role in shaping imperial and trans-imperial relations around the world.” Scholars of empire should take note.
Tourism and empire have long been closely linked. Leisure travel went global on the backs of imperial regimes during the second half of the nineteenth century. They used it as a means of exercising power and of both promoting and justifying their rule. At the same time, indigenes also utilised it to create a sense of common purpose and to exercise resistance. Following decolonisation, the mark left by empire tourism remained. The image sold to tourists frequently changed little. Power tended to reside with the same groups. And yet, postcolonial governments often used tourism to promote economic development. Tourism workers were sometimes able to parley skills earned before independence to attain leadership roles afterward. On a more negative front, some developers created sites celebrating nostalgia for the colonial era, selectively forgetting inconvenient truths.
Shaping Imperial Relationships
By the mid-nineteenth century, modern tourism was well established. There were guidebooks telling people “what ought to be seen,” a belief that tourism promised self-improvement and that people should engage in it, and even a deep connection between tourism and politics that dated to the start of the Grand Tour. What's more, tourism and nationalism enjoyed a symbiotic bond, each promoting the other in ways that imperialists would ultimately find very useful and that indigenes would utilise as well.Footnote 1 Indeed, the growth of modern European empires during the nineteenth century turned the politics of tourism to new purpose. Leisure travel had the potential to create identities, to fuel support for political ideologies, to teach people about the nation-state and its activities. In imperial settings, it further magnified differences between self and other while helping forward a narrative that justified colonial rule. The Belgians, whose actions in Congo were horrific by any standard, even tried to use it to “recover its tarnished reputation.”Footnote 2 Tourism showcased what Europeans perceived as progress: the construction of railways or the introduction of new agricultural techniques, for example. It highlighted difference and sold a narrative of white superiority.
Until quite recently the historiography of empire tourism in English was limited, yet evocative. Without any pretension to being exhaustive: there was excellent work on hill stations,Footnote 3 engaging stories about the Thomas Cook and Son travel agency,Footnote 4 studies of the Orientalising role of guidebooks,Footnote 5 small literatures exploring tourism experiences in French,Footnote 6 Italian,Footnote 7 and BelgianFootnote 8 colonies, along with a few other bits and bobs.Footnote 9 For the most part, narratives depicted power that flowed in one direction, assuring that Europeans were aware of the barbarity of those they ruled.Footnote 10
Laith Shakir's contribution to this issue certainly illustrates that such a focus on the imperial uses of tourism is important. His essay shows the critical role of infrastructure in the colonialist imaginary by making clear “how empire lay at the heart of transportation infrastructure.” Just as with railways roughly a half century before, the development of air routes had considerable promise. Imperial Airways’ “empire route” would “frame colonial development as exciting for tourists,” yielding political and economic benefits in the process. From a British perspective, it was also “morally sound” because it would “improve” the Iraqis by dragging them into modernity. Imperial Airways would make Iraq a vital hub, a “transit node,” and a point of connection with the wider world. This imperialist message was spread widely through advertisements, articles “in specialist and general interest periodicals,” as well as through both textual and visual ephemera. As tourists gazed down on the ruins of 10,000 years of human history, they could reflect on Britain's benevolence and its role in bringing the ancient world up to date.Footnote 11
The symbolic role of modern technology extended beyond transportation; it could even help make places deemed unhealthy healthy. As is widely known, for most of the nineteenth century much of Central and South America represented a “graveyard for white folks,” with diseases such as dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, yaws, dropsy, and distemper resulting in as many as 121.3 deaths per thousand among British troops stationed in Jamaica between 1817 and 1836.Footnote 12 According to Elliott Sturtevant, one important means of making the tropics safe for white people was “thermal colonization,” utilising refrigeration to cool both bananas and tourists so that they might safely cross the “heat line.” As with transportation technology, air conditioning offered the “use of a sense of temperature to justify colonial expansion and inhabitation.” It would combat economic backwardness, drawing a contrast between white industriousness and Jamaica's Black inhabitants who stood as examples of the primitivism being vanquished by modern technology.
As much symbolic power as tourism held for colonisers, it was not a one-way street, a simple binary of oppressed and oppressor. Indigenes had agency. They were exploited, but they could and did use tourism as well. Sometimes this meant creating narratives celebrating their own culture and history, sometimes it meant pushing a political agenda, and sometimes it meant using tourism as a site of resistance. This should not surprise. Travel created, as Mary Louise Pratt noted many years ago, a “contact zone” in which different groups confronted one another.Footnote 13 Those interactions generated a lot of messy complexity.
Empire tourism in Java yielded just such a contact zone with various results. Dutch authorities, much like other colonial regimes, used tourism to help legitimise their rule, “maintaining colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender.” As Arnout van der Meer recounts, the story did not stop there. Javanese tourism workers had their limits. In one instance, a guide, angered by mistreatment and “meagre pay,” extracted revenge by killing one of his bosses.Footnote 14 Things were not usually so stark. Tourist spaces represented a liminal space where colonial norms were transgressed, despite coloniser concerns about racial and cultural purity. This reality evidently held true in many colonised areas. In a recent book, Todd Cleveland notes that while racial divisions were usually strictly enforced in Mozambique, in tourism spaces Blacks and whites interacted in “highly unconventional ways” that diverged significantly from “prevailing colonial standards.”Footnote 15
Tourism sometimes offered an opportunity for colonial subjects to exert agency in ways that might not have been possible in other arenas. Thus, Candida Keithley describes how Māori guides in New Zealand constructed “an imagined Whakarewarewa.” They selected sites and constructed narratives which deviated from that of British imperialists, not to mention tourists. Their efforts “challenged the government's material maps and the exotic fantasies of tourists … undermining the supposed substantive sovereignty of the Crown and the cultural processes of colonization.” The “Crown believed it should be the one in charge,” but this act of Māori resistance demonstrates that tourism placed unique pressures on imperial hegemony.
Until recently, scholars largely seem to have missed the agency that van der Meer, Keithley, and Cleveland describe. There was perhaps too much acceptance of Gayatri Spivak's declaration that “the voice of the colonized subject can never be recovered” for “it has been drowned out by the oppressive collusion of colonial discourses.”Footnote 16 While imperialists undoubtedly hoped to silence their subjects, they were not nearly that powerful. Even the Raj was never “an administrative monolith, a leviathan that was capable of repressing all opposition (and certainly of suppressing any ethnic assertion).”Footnote 17
The challenge is to listen carefully for subaltern voices. Because of the liminal zones it created, tourism represents an intriguing place to do so, and it provides a variety of previously underutilised sources for exploration. As is clear in the essays included here, oral histories, passed-down oral traditions, and even tourism-related material culture and publications offer fruitful opportunities. To further illustrate the point, in India, for example, there is a trail of source material beginning with “Company” paintings produced by Indian artists for sale to members of the East India Company. These images were designed to satisfy a European gaze, but they contain details that showcase a local interpretation of culture.Footnote 18 Later, Indian authors wrote their own guides, careful readings of which illustrate a multiplicity of interpretations of religion, history, and landscape demonstrating the complexity of Indian politics on the sub-Continent at the fin de siècle, not to mention narratives of India's past and people that are separate from the imperial gaze.Footnote 19
In this collection, Susie Protschky seeks clues about the lives of subaltern tourism workers in Indonesia using yet another source: photographs taken by Europeans that include porters and guides. Although these tourism workers do not generally turn up in European writing, they do appear in tourist images. According to Protschky, “It is chiefly in photographs that we get a sense of what the labour of Indonesian tourism workers who facilitated these activities entailed.” The images, which tend to strike “a more intimate register” make “subalterns ‘visible’.” We find porters and guides acting as body servants, providing protection, carrying Europeans and their gear up steep mountains, cooking meals, and so on. It was often backbreaking, and yet, at least some workers appear as “members of a travelling household.” They are presented in a different light from other Indonesians “whom photographers frequently cast as exotic members of groups discernible by the styles of their hair, ornaments, clothing, and accoutrements.” Put another way, the photographs show tourism labourers given insider status, transgressing more ordinary barriers.
Colonial Baggage: Tourism and the Legacies of Empire
Tourism is also part of the story of collapsing empires. Tourist infrastructure clearly had symbolic significance for both colonisers and colonised. For example, while hotel workers were almost always unwelcome when not working, patrons enjoyed every luxury. As Blake C. Scott puts it: “As ‘bastions’ of privilege, yet dependent on racialised and exploited labour, hotels evolved into battlegrounds between the colonial past-present and an undecided future. They were, in the words of scholar James Clifford, “ ‘crucial sites for an unfinished modernity’ …. A site not only for luxury but also protest.”Footnote 20 Thus, hotels in Panama, Egypt, and Cuba were the target of extreme violence.Footnote 21
Other tourism sites also became focal points for anti-colonial struggle. In Mozambique, the Gorongosa park drew the attention of freedom fighters who recognised that it was a source of significant income and positive publicity for the Portuguese regime. The result were violent altercations and a number of deaths.Footnote 22 The story in India is more nuanced; at least some Indian guidebook writers used their books to direct Indian tourists toward an understanding of “all India” as a singular nation—an important stage on the path to Independence and a direct swipe at the divide-and-conquer strategy used by the Raj.Footnote 23
Violence aside, the increasingly altered composition of visitors to colonial resorts reflected a coming change. In Java, the Javanese “embrace of mountain resorts and colonial tourist itineraries” equated to what van der Meer describes as “a remarkable and telling moment in (post)colonial history.” Something similar happened in India when South Asians began adopting hill stations at Darjeeling and Shimla, for example, as their own, driving their colonial rulers out.Footnote 24
Following the ultimate collapse of empires, tourism represented a viable development strategy for newly independent postcolonial states. Industries created for both economic and political reasons during the colonial era were repurposed for a new age. In her article, Dörte Lerp discusses the differing approaches to tourism adopted in Tanzania and Kenya. In each case, the “myth of wild Africa,” complete with impressive and unique wildlife, was the predominant product. Tourism facilitated wildlife conservation as well as employment and income. According to Lerp, however, the emphasis on conservation “meant that colonial motives and stereotypes remained central to the marketing of East Africa.” In Kenya, developing tourism meant opting for “a liberal approach” that opened “the country for mass tourism as well as for private investors.” Tanzanian officials adopted a different strategy, “trying to consolidate tourism development with [Julius] Nyerere's vision of African socialism,” an idea that was supposed to “overcome colonial dependencies.” This required far more state intervention and management. According to Lerp, neither approach was perfect. In Kenya, the sale of “wildlife experiences … led to a further proliferation of colonial stereotypes.” Most jobs paid little until government officials intervened to help “African Kenyans to enter high end jobs within the tourism sector.” In Tanzania, socialism proved ineffective. Infrastructure fell into decline, and privatisation proved necessary.
Further south in Mozambique, the government initially rejected tourism because of its colonial associations, but here too the industry ultimately proved too enticing to pass up. What is interesting is that for those who had engaged in tourism work during the colonial period the postcolonial flowering of tourism meant an opportunity to capitalise. Their experience allowed them to take leading roles, to pass on skills, and to make better lives for themselves and their families. At least in this case, the colonial baggage was a little easier to carry.Footnote 25
The baggage weighs much heavier elsewhere. In at least some former colonies, the product is not safaris, it is colonial nostalgia. In Southeast Asia, former hill station hotels have been renovated and restored. Tourists can now experience the look of colonial sites, not to mention the luxury and service provided to largely white patrons by dark-skinned service staff.Footnote 26 The story is remarkably similar in India where government efforts to escape colonial legacies have had little impact on the provision of colonial nostalgia for tourists, including young Indians who, frustrated with the present, seek roles in a past that never really was. The Raj is remembered warmly, “despite the brutal British imperialism.”Footnote 27 Yet there is an even more disturbing brand of colonial nostalgia, so-called “cannibal tours” in which well-to-do white tourists throw pennies at dark-skinned locals while calling for them to dance.Footnote 28 It is an activity little removed from imperialist notions of white superiority to “primitive” natives.
Conclusion
Scholars often view tourism as a form of imperialism, defined by an unequal exchange between host and guest.Footnote 29 There is an attractive minimalism to this idea, but adopting it risks oversimplification. A better strategy is to consider the historical connections between empire and tourism, tracing how leisure travel offered both a toolbox for imperialist oppression and opportunities for more localised agency and expression.
Ireland is a case in point. It is England's oldest colony. In the nineteenth century, tourists visited to see beautiful landscapes, but also to consume views of Irish poverty. During the Potato Famine (1845–52), they came to watch people die, content that what they witnessed confirmed their own superiority.Footnote 30 By the 1890s, the story is one of English entrepreneurs attempting to profit from the beauty of newly uninhabited landscapes.Footnote 31 Yet, the more remarkable story of Irish tourism development came after the Anglo-Irish Treaty when Irish men and women, both nationally and at a local level, endeavoured to build an industry and to create their own historical, cultural, and scenic narratives that would confirm their own sense of self, while also drawing visitors. As they undertook this process, they engaged with foreign governments and tourist boards, tourists (who are always free to reach their own conclusions and who exercise their own agency), and other groups as well. Tourism is always a nexus for the interaction of many groups and individuals actively pursuing their own ends and arriving at the table with their own preconceptions. It is never simple. Together all these groups helped to “make Ireland Irish” through tourism after centuries of colonial rule.Footnote 32
This special issue highlights the evolving complexities of the tourism/empire relationship over time and illustrates the promise of future study. There is more to do. The differing experience by place and time needs more work. We need a better sense, as Stanley Fonseca recently pointed out, of “how colonial roots of mass tourism structured and shaped its evolution,” not to mention how that connection evolved. This relationship was not fixed but was instead “evolving and fluid.”Footnote 33 We need studies that show this evolution and that explain why it transpired. This special issue marks an important step in those directions.
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In their introduction, Andreas Greiner and Mikko Toivanen express their objective for this special issue: to critically assess the “ ‘colonial baggage’ of tourism” and to “demonstrate that tourism, far from being a mere curiosity, played a crucial role in shaping imperial and trans-imperial relations around the world.” Scholars of empire should take note.
Tourism and empire have long been closely linked. Leisure travel went global on the backs of imperial regimes during the second half of the nineteenth century. They used it as a means of exercising power and of both promoting and justifying their rule. At the same time, indigenes also utilised it to create a sense of common purpose and to exercise resistance. Following decolonisation, the mark left by empire tourism remained. The image sold to tourists frequently changed little. Power tended to reside with the same groups. And yet, postcolonial governments often used tourism to promote economic development. Tourism workers were sometimes able to parley skills earned before independence to attain leadership roles afterward. On a more negative front, some developers created sites celebrating nostalgia for the colonial era, selectively forgetting inconvenient truths.
Shaping Imperial Relationships
By the mid-nineteenth century, modern tourism was well established. There were guidebooks telling people “what ought to be seen,” a belief that tourism promised self-improvement and that people should engage in it, and even a deep connection between tourism and politics that dated to the start of the Grand Tour. What's more, tourism and nationalism enjoyed a symbiotic bond, each promoting the other in ways that imperialists would ultimately find very useful and that indigenes would utilise as well.Footnote 1 Indeed, the growth of modern European empires during the nineteenth century turned the politics of tourism to new purpose. Leisure travel had the potential to create identities, to fuel support for political ideologies, to teach people about the nation-state and its activities. In imperial settings, it further magnified differences between self and other while helping forward a narrative that justified colonial rule. The Belgians, whose actions in Congo were horrific by any standard, even tried to use it to “recover its tarnished reputation.”Footnote 2 Tourism showcased what Europeans perceived as progress: the construction of railways or the introduction of new agricultural techniques, for example. It highlighted difference and sold a narrative of white superiority.
Until quite recently the historiography of empire tourism in English was limited, yet evocative. Without any pretension to being exhaustive: there was excellent work on hill stations,Footnote 3 engaging stories about the Thomas Cook and Son travel agency,Footnote 4 studies of the Orientalising role of guidebooks,Footnote 5 small literatures exploring tourism experiences in French,Footnote 6 Italian,Footnote 7 and BelgianFootnote 8 colonies, along with a few other bits and bobs.Footnote 9 For the most part, narratives depicted power that flowed in one direction, assuring that Europeans were aware of the barbarity of those they ruled.Footnote 10
Laith Shakir's contribution to this issue certainly illustrates that such a focus on the imperial uses of tourism is important. His essay shows the critical role of infrastructure in the colonialist imaginary by making clear “how empire lay at the heart of transportation infrastructure.” Just as with railways roughly a half century before, the development of air routes had considerable promise. Imperial Airways’ “empire route” would “frame colonial development as exciting for tourists,” yielding political and economic benefits in the process. From a British perspective, it was also “morally sound” because it would “improve” the Iraqis by dragging them into modernity. Imperial Airways would make Iraq a vital hub, a “transit node,” and a point of connection with the wider world. This imperialist message was spread widely through advertisements, articles “in specialist and general interest periodicals,” as well as through both textual and visual ephemera. As tourists gazed down on the ruins of 10,000 years of human history, they could reflect on Britain's benevolence and its role in bringing the ancient world up to date.Footnote 11
The symbolic role of modern technology extended beyond transportation; it could even help make places deemed unhealthy healthy. As is widely known, for most of the nineteenth century much of Central and South America represented a “graveyard for white folks,” with diseases such as dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, yaws, dropsy, and distemper resulting in as many as 121.3 deaths per thousand among British troops stationed in Jamaica between 1817 and 1836.Footnote 12 According to Elliott Sturtevant, one important means of making the tropics safe for white people was “thermal colonization,” utilising refrigeration to cool both bananas and tourists so that they might safely cross the “heat line.” As with transportation technology, air conditioning offered the “use of a sense of temperature to justify colonial expansion and inhabitation.” It would combat economic backwardness, drawing a contrast between white industriousness and Jamaica's Black inhabitants who stood as examples of the primitivism being vanquished by modern technology.
As much symbolic power as tourism held for colonisers, it was not a one-way street, a simple binary of oppressed and oppressor. Indigenes had agency. They were exploited, but they could and did use tourism as well. Sometimes this meant creating narratives celebrating their own culture and history, sometimes it meant pushing a political agenda, and sometimes it meant using tourism as a site of resistance. This should not surprise. Travel created, as Mary Louise Pratt noted many years ago, a “contact zone” in which different groups confronted one another.Footnote 13 Those interactions generated a lot of messy complexity.
Empire tourism in Java yielded just such a contact zone with various results. Dutch authorities, much like other colonial regimes, used tourism to help legitimise their rule, “maintaining colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender.” As Arnout van der Meer recounts, the story did not stop there. Javanese tourism workers had their limits. In one instance, a guide, angered by mistreatment and “meagre pay,” extracted revenge by killing one of his bosses.Footnote 14 Things were not usually so stark. Tourist spaces represented a liminal space where colonial norms were transgressed, despite coloniser concerns about racial and cultural purity. This reality evidently held true in many colonised areas. In a recent book, Todd Cleveland notes that while racial divisions were usually strictly enforced in Mozambique, in tourism spaces Blacks and whites interacted in “highly unconventional ways” that diverged significantly from “prevailing colonial standards.”Footnote 15
Tourism sometimes offered an opportunity for colonial subjects to exert agency in ways that might not have been possible in other arenas. Thus, Candida Keithley describes how Māori guides in New Zealand constructed “an imagined Whakarewarewa.” They selected sites and constructed narratives which deviated from that of British imperialists, not to mention tourists. Their efforts “challenged the government's material maps and the exotic fantasies of tourists … undermining the supposed substantive sovereignty of the Crown and the cultural processes of colonization.” The “Crown believed it should be the one in charge,” but this act of Māori resistance demonstrates that tourism placed unique pressures on imperial hegemony.
Until recently, scholars largely seem to have missed the agency that van der Meer, Keithley, and Cleveland describe. There was perhaps too much acceptance of Gayatri Spivak's declaration that “the voice of the colonized subject can never be recovered” for “it has been drowned out by the oppressive collusion of colonial discourses.”Footnote 16 While imperialists undoubtedly hoped to silence their subjects, they were not nearly that powerful. Even the Raj was never “an administrative monolith, a leviathan that was capable of repressing all opposition (and certainly of suppressing any ethnic assertion).”Footnote 17
The challenge is to listen carefully for subaltern voices. Because of the liminal zones it created, tourism represents an intriguing place to do so, and it provides a variety of previously underutilised sources for exploration. As is clear in the essays included here, oral histories, passed-down oral traditions, and even tourism-related material culture and publications offer fruitful opportunities. To further illustrate the point, in India, for example, there is a trail of source material beginning with “Company” paintings produced by Indian artists for sale to members of the East India Company. These images were designed to satisfy a European gaze, but they contain details that showcase a local interpretation of culture.Footnote 18 Later, Indian authors wrote their own guides, careful readings of which illustrate a multiplicity of interpretations of religion, history, and landscape demonstrating the complexity of Indian politics on the sub-Continent at the fin de siècle, not to mention narratives of India's past and people that are separate from the imperial gaze.Footnote 19
In this collection, Susie Protschky seeks clues about the lives of subaltern tourism workers in Indonesia using yet another source: photographs taken by Europeans that include porters and guides. Although these tourism workers do not generally turn up in European writing, they do appear in tourist images. According to Protschky, “It is chiefly in photographs that we get a sense of what the labour of Indonesian tourism workers who facilitated these activities entailed.” The images, which tend to strike “a more intimate register” make “subalterns ‘visible’.” We find porters and guides acting as body servants, providing protection, carrying Europeans and their gear up steep mountains, cooking meals, and so on. It was often backbreaking, and yet, at least some workers appear as “members of a travelling household.” They are presented in a different light from other Indonesians “whom photographers frequently cast as exotic members of groups discernible by the styles of their hair, ornaments, clothing, and accoutrements.” Put another way, the photographs show tourism labourers given insider status, transgressing more ordinary barriers.
Colonial Baggage: Tourism and the Legacies of Empire
Tourism is also part of the story of collapsing empires. Tourist infrastructure clearly had symbolic significance for both colonisers and colonised. For example, while hotel workers were almost always unwelcome when not working, patrons enjoyed every luxury. As Blake C. Scott puts it: “As ‘bastions’ of privilege, yet dependent on racialised and exploited labour, hotels evolved into battlegrounds between the colonial past-present and an undecided future. They were, in the words of scholar James Clifford, “ ‘crucial sites for an unfinished modernity’ …. A site not only for luxury but also protest.”Footnote 20 Thus, hotels in Panama, Egypt, and Cuba were the target of extreme violence.Footnote 21
Other tourism sites also became focal points for anti-colonial struggle. In Mozambique, the Gorongosa park drew the attention of freedom fighters who recognised that it was a source of significant income and positive publicity for the Portuguese regime. The result were violent altercations and a number of deaths.Footnote 22 The story in India is more nuanced; at least some Indian guidebook writers used their books to direct Indian tourists toward an understanding of “all India” as a singular nation—an important stage on the path to Independence and a direct swipe at the divide-and-conquer strategy used by the Raj.Footnote 23
Violence aside, the increasingly altered composition of visitors to colonial resorts reflected a coming change. In Java, the Javanese “embrace of mountain resorts and colonial tourist itineraries” equated to what van der Meer describes as “a remarkable and telling moment in (post)colonial history.” Something similar happened in India when South Asians began adopting hill stations at Darjeeling and Shimla, for example, as their own, driving their colonial rulers out.Footnote 24
Following the ultimate collapse of empires, tourism represented a viable development strategy for newly independent postcolonial states. Industries created for both economic and political reasons during the colonial era were repurposed for a new age. In her article, Dörte Lerp discusses the differing approaches to tourism adopted in Tanzania and Kenya. In each case, the “myth of wild Africa,” complete with impressive and unique wildlife, was the predominant product. Tourism facilitated wildlife conservation as well as employment and income. According to Lerp, however, the emphasis on conservation “meant that colonial motives and stereotypes remained central to the marketing of East Africa.” In Kenya, developing tourism meant opting for “a liberal approach” that opened “the country for mass tourism as well as for private investors.” Tanzanian officials adopted a different strategy, “trying to consolidate tourism development with [Julius] Nyerere's vision of African socialism,” an idea that was supposed to “overcome colonial dependencies.” This required far more state intervention and management. According to Lerp, neither approach was perfect. In Kenya, the sale of “wildlife experiences … led to a further proliferation of colonial stereotypes.” Most jobs paid little until government officials intervened to help “African Kenyans to enter high end jobs within the tourism sector.” In Tanzania, socialism proved ineffective. Infrastructure fell into decline, and privatisation proved necessary.
Further south in Mozambique, the government initially rejected tourism because of its colonial associations, but here too the industry ultimately proved too enticing to pass up. What is interesting is that for those who had engaged in tourism work during the colonial period the postcolonial flowering of tourism meant an opportunity to capitalise. Their experience allowed them to take leading roles, to pass on skills, and to make better lives for themselves and their families. At least in this case, the colonial baggage was a little easier to carry.Footnote 25
The baggage weighs much heavier elsewhere. In at least some former colonies, the product is not safaris, it is colonial nostalgia. In Southeast Asia, former hill station hotels have been renovated and restored. Tourists can now experience the look of colonial sites, not to mention the luxury and service provided to largely white patrons by dark-skinned service staff.Footnote 26 The story is remarkably similar in India where government efforts to escape colonial legacies have had little impact on the provision of colonial nostalgia for tourists, including young Indians who, frustrated with the present, seek roles in a past that never really was. The Raj is remembered warmly, “despite the brutal British imperialism.”Footnote 27 Yet there is an even more disturbing brand of colonial nostalgia, so-called “cannibal tours” in which well-to-do white tourists throw pennies at dark-skinned locals while calling for them to dance.Footnote 28 It is an activity little removed from imperialist notions of white superiority to “primitive” natives.
Conclusion
Scholars often view tourism as a form of imperialism, defined by an unequal exchange between host and guest.Footnote 29 There is an attractive minimalism to this idea, but adopting it risks oversimplification. A better strategy is to consider the historical connections between empire and tourism, tracing how leisure travel offered both a toolbox for imperialist oppression and opportunities for more localised agency and expression.
Ireland is a case in point. It is England's oldest colony. In the nineteenth century, tourists visited to see beautiful landscapes, but also to consume views of Irish poverty. During the Potato Famine (1845–52), they came to watch people die, content that what they witnessed confirmed their own superiority.Footnote 30 By the 1890s, the story is one of English entrepreneurs attempting to profit from the beauty of newly uninhabited landscapes.Footnote 31 Yet, the more remarkable story of Irish tourism development came after the Anglo-Irish Treaty when Irish men and women, both nationally and at a local level, endeavoured to build an industry and to create their own historical, cultural, and scenic narratives that would confirm their own sense of self, while also drawing visitors. As they undertook this process, they engaged with foreign governments and tourist boards, tourists (who are always free to reach their own conclusions and who exercise their own agency), and other groups as well. Tourism is always a nexus for the interaction of many groups and individuals actively pursuing their own ends and arriving at the table with their own preconceptions. It is never simple. Together all these groups helped to “make Ireland Irish” through tourism after centuries of colonial rule.Footnote 32
This special issue highlights the evolving complexities of the tourism/empire relationship over time and illustrates the promise of future study. There is more to do. The differing experience by place and time needs more work. We need a better sense, as Stanley Fonseca recently pointed out, of “how colonial roots of mass tourism structured and shaped its evolution,” not to mention how that connection evolved. This relationship was not fixed but was instead “evolving and fluid.”Footnote 33 We need studies that show this evolution and that explain why it transpired. This special issue marks an important step in those directions.