A Brief History of Travel Writing (Old World Wandering: A Travelogue)

"Probably the best essay on travel writing on you'll read."
Sairam Krishnan

Travel writing is one of the world's oldest literary traditions, and tales like Gilgamesh or Homer's Odyssey remain important to us today, thousands of years after they were first told. The genre has evolved in lockstep with civilisation, adapting itself to pilgrimage, the printing press, photography, the steamship and budget flights, but at its core, the travelogue remains the same. It is still a tale of the wanderer, who is an outsider and must exist without a neatly defined social role, or comparisons to other people – except to say that they are tied to this place and I am not. And yet, the travel writer is also a person with an audience, borrowing from the literary traditions of his or her culture, and the travelogue is, in this sense, a link between settlement, with its child, writing, and the earlier world of nomadism.

In this wide-ranging essay, Iain Manley follows travel writing through history, from the invention of cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent to the travel blog, trying to discover why the genre remains so relevant today, in our hyperlinked world.

About Old World Wandering:

A series of dispatches from Asia, Europe and Africa, Old World Wandering is about hauling backpacks across borders to find connections within regions and across cultures.

“Thoughtful, well-written slow travel writing with a strong sense of history and culture is hard to find nowadays—here’s one place where it reliably can be found.”
Daisann McLane, National Geographic Traveller

“Old World Wandering is a happy marriage of unusual locations, good writing and an infective love of travel, grounded in a real understanding not only of the places they write about, but of the nature and delights of journeys themselves.”
Alec Ash (@alecash)

“Old World Wandering consistently puts out some of the best travel writing around. That the whole thing is done by two people on a shoestring makes it all the more incredible.”
Aaron Lammer, Longform.org

“Old World Wandering is taking a new and refreshing approach to travel writing, creating a travelogue that offers sharp, detailed long-form narratives.”
Henry Lane Fox, The Browser