The Making of Modern Tourism

JOHN BECKERSON Museum Curator, Oral Historian and Researcher for Universities, Heritage Bodies and Government CHLOE CHARD Literary Historian, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles TOBIAS DA-RING Lecturer in Literature and Cultural Studies, Freie Universitat, Berlin ALEXANDER C.T. GEPPERT Research Associate, Department of History, Institute of Florence EVELINE KILIAN Lecturer in English Literature, Tubingen University, Germany HELGA QUADFLIEG Lecturer in English Literature, University of Wurzburg, Germany STEPHEN PRICKETT Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Galsgow GERHARD STILZ Professor of English Literature, Tubingen University, Germany JOHN WALTON Professor of Social History and Director of Research in History, University of Central Lancashire SUE WRIGHT Doctoral Scholar, History Department, Sheffield Hallam University

At the end of the twentieth century, tourism is the world's largest single industry. Even if tourism saw its most spectacular development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of the numbers involved, it rests on a cultural foundation inaugurated in the early modern period.At the end of the twentieth century, tourism is the world's largest single industry. Tourism, however, is not only an economic and social phenomenon but can be 'read' in semiotic terms centred around dreams of alternatives to everyday life. The images, which today dominate advertisements for tourist products, had to be constructed and sustained, invented and remoulded over a long historical process. It seems that without this distinctive historical and cultural 'baggage' the remarkable social practice of taking holidays would not have evolved. Even if tourism saw its most spectacular development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of the numbers involved, it rests on a cultural foundation inaugurated in the early modern period. The Making of Modern Tourism was a long-term process, deeply rooted in the cultural and intellectual, economic and social history of Britain.