The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000

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 centered around dreams of alternatives to everyday life. The images, which today dominate advertisements for tourist products, had to be constructed and sustained, invented and remolded 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.This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from fields as far apart as literary studies and economic history, who trace the history of tourism from the Renaissance to the present day, combing fresh findings from ongoing research with state-of-the-art surveys.