The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘nation’ as ‘an extensive aggregate of persons, so closely related with each other by common descent, language or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory’ (1a). ‘Extensive aggregate’ sets the bar so high that ancient Athens or medieval Florence would not qualify; ‘closely related’ is difficult to reconcile with the anonymity of the metropolis, held together by newspapers and railway timetables more than personal ties; ‘common descent, language or history’ would scarcely apply to the UK archipelago; ‘distinct race’ is a decidedly loaded term; and ‘separate political state’ begs the question of the relation of Scotland to Britain, Catalonia to Spain, or Quebec to Canada. As to ‘occupying a definite territory’, one might imagine circumstances of exodus where entire populations are in transit: in the wake of war, as with Stalin's mass transportations from the Caucasus or as a consequence of global warming, from desertification in sub-Saharan Africa to rising sea-levels in low-lying coastal areas.

The source of the idea of nation more usually would be metonymic: the individual is transposed to the level of the collective. Complex interiority would simply distract from the communal narration of the nation. As Benedict Anderson argues, the latter is constituted through the experience of empty homogeneous time, wholly devoid of the structured temporality of quest, obstacle and return. Furthermore, the travel book narrates a finite individual life-segment rather than positing the continuity of nation across generations.

Herodotus's Histories establishes the fundamental binary of citizen/barbarian and home/abroad, but it is difficult to regard the fissiparous city-states of ancient Greece as nations in any modern sense. This requires a fusion of Enlightenment sociology (national characteristics) with Romantic self-definition (atavistic past projected into utopian horizon). The Enlightenment ideal of the disengaged universal citizen might appear incompatible with the Romantic traveller embedded in a unique cultural history, but both depend on increasing rates of literacy through the early eighteenth century. Using Britain as a single example, travel literature in the period may roughly be categorized as domestic tourism (see home tour); the European Grand Tour; and international Voyages.