Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.

Returning to some of the themes addressed in Chapter 3, this final chapter considers the wider social responsibilities of archaeologists working in southern Africa in the twenty-first century. Matters discussed include gender and racial equity within the discipline itself (especially with respect to South Africa), how best to relate the work done by archaeologists to the wider public, heritage management and conflicts over this (including the restitution of cultural sites, property, and human remains), the roles of contract archaeology, university teaching departments, and museums, the importance of publication, and the potential for developing post-colonial approaches to the interpretation of archaeological evidence. In highlighting possible future research trends, the chapter concludes by emphasising the need for work that is both intellectually sound and socially engaged and by reiterating the global significance of southern Africa’s immensely long and varied archaeological record.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.

The second chapter considers the Inns of Court in their relationship to the broader city, both the people who lived, worked, or visited central London and the governing bodies responsible for regulating the capital. The chapter highlights the societies’ struggle to maintain their local autonomy while fulfilling obligations to the public good and, increasingly, to public opinion. The Inns were geographically and legally separate from the rest of the capital, but they connected with the central London populace via efforts to promote citizens’ physical, moral, and cultural well-being. At the same time, the societies clashed with newly created, centralized metropolitan bodies designed to order the metropolis in the name of public health. Disputes between the Inns and entities like the Metropolitan Board of Works represented a conflict between an ancient system of local authority and processes of urban rationalization, a tension that defined metropolitan modernity in Britain. As competing strains within liberalism pushed institutions to engage in philanthropy in ways that could undermine institutional authority, the Inns found themselves unable to fully salvage their autonomy.

As with practically everything in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, we must consider the colonial context of foreign ‘viewings’ of the Nile Delta. Tourists pulled to the top of the Great Pyramid by Egyptian guides look down on a scene onto which they project their own recent experiences of Egypt and their knowledge of its history. They look, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, with ‘imperial eyes’. When they venture into the landscape of the Delta itself, such as on the sporting trips recommended in Cairo of To-Day, they move through a landscape whose infrastructure and, to a certain extent, socio-economic system are the products of imperialism, and also of Egyptian nation-building in an international, imperial context. In this chapter, I shall explore these themes of modernity and imperialism through a superficially innocent genre of writing – the Euro-American travelogue – and a more overtly political genre – the contemporary Egyptian autobiography. For both, the late 19th and early 20th century Delta is in a sense a place of lost innocence, although they survey its landscape from two very different viewing platforms. The tension between the Delta of the shadūf and the Delta of the railway is always present.

With a focus on the nineteenth century, this chapter shows the ways American essayists responded to the new possibilities of national and international travel in the modern age. Modernity offered the ideal conditions under which American travel essays could proliferate: developing infrastructures in transportation, communication, and the publication and distribution of books and periodicals; the growing commercial and imperial reach of the United States; rising literacy rates, which ensured a market for these texts; Old World tourism as a marker of elite and then middle-class identity; the status of Europe as a site of professional training; transatlantic networks of reformers; missionary activity in Asia and Africa; and hemispheric travel in the Americas. Travel writings were popular, a sign that they were performing significant cultural work. The tourist’s or expatriate’s provisional relationship to other peoples and places lent itself to the genre of the essay; this emphasis informed many travel essays. In rendering the interactions between consciousness and place, Americans pushed the boundaries of the genre, as travel essays blended with journalism, fiction, and autobiography.

The two main political parties formed in the early 1940s, the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party, soon dominated electoral politics. Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante were founder-leaders of these parties, both serving as prime minister. A West Indian Federation movement in the late 1950s and 1960s collapsed on the eve of Jamaican independence in 1962. Jamaica’s political development since independence has been beset by the seemingly intractable problems of operating a successful economy and combating deprivation, poverty, violence and drugs. Polarised political, economic and social policies dominated the 1970s, under Prime Ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. Relative political stability returned to Jamaica with Prime Minister P J. Patterson between 1992 and 2006.

Poverty, neglect and crime are still extensive, but Jamaica has achieved many positive objectives since the Second World War. Educational opportunities have increased rapidly. The creative arts have made their local and international imprint in music, art, dance and literature. Jamaica has become a notable contributor to different sports. Comparing 2021 with 1945, Jamaica has assumed a greater position globally with diasporic migration creating strong networks between Jamaicans in Anglophone countries, sustained pride in independent nationhood and as a magnet for large flows of tourists.

While most critics focus their attentions elsewhere, A Passage to India is at least partly a book about tourism and about the sort of interactions that regularly take place between myriad groups as a consequence of this pastime. There is quite a lot of evidence for reading the novel in this way. The first two of the three sections in the book begin with short chapters written loosely in the form of a guidebook introducing geography, geology, history, and cultural differences. Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested are ultimately tourists anxious “about seeing the real India.”1 Their arrival in Chandrapore spawns relationships and drama around which the plot revolves, including a pivotal crisis experienced during an ill-fated excursion to see the Marabar Caves. The book ends with the contrast of religious festival and touristic gaze as the English characters, along with Muslim protagonist Dr. Aziz, watch a festival related to Lord Krishna.

In grand hotels, the classes and nations mixed in higher concentrations than anywhere else in the city. Grand hotels offered spaces for the elite exercise of freedom but under the necessary conditions of staff surveillance and mutual policing on the part of the guests. Interclass equilibrium rested on the existence of a strict, intricate hierarchy for workers and unspoken norms of dress and comportment for guests. Grand hoteliers had to keep their properties free from conflict, after all, and this they accomplished with recourse to a liberal balance of freedom and control. The arrangement lasted until August 1914, when everyone – guests, white-collar employees, managers, workers, owners – went to war. Then, and all of a sudden, violence erupted in grand hotel lobbies. In one blow, World War I shattered the liberal ideal upon which Berlin’s grand hotels were founded. That ideal, dependent upon an equilibrium supported by little more than architecture, regulation, and unspoken rules, had serious weaknesses, it turned out.

This chapter shows how the material and ritual legacies of apostolic Rome provoked debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and imperial Rome. We demonstrate how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how anglophone travellers constructed their modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Italian Other. Yet critics have paid insufficient attention to how religious difference and sectarian identity shaped such attitudes. Catholics had a special commitment to validating the early history of the Roman Church, but Protestants also had an active interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the splendour of medieval Catholicism – Protestant commentators vindicated their faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. Yet if British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, some Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, combining the aesthetic appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicizing emphasis on the material legacies of apostolic antiquity.

This essay provides an overview of Sebald’s work in relation to the literary topos of ‘travel writing’. Considering his work from Nach der Natur to the Korsika Project, it illuminates some of the sources on which he drew (including Thomas More and Thomas Mann), the contexts within which he worked, and the contribution of his work itself to contemporary modes of travel writing. The essay marks out the key waypoints in the history of the form, including its implication in the history of imperial expansion as well as its connection with the ‘grand tour’, while also sketching out some more recent interpretations as they have been conceived by writers like Bruce Chatwin. Within Sebald’s work, it suggests that the idea of the contemporary travel writer as an ‘outmoded’ figure is key to an ‘atmospherics of lateness’, and even that the coinage ‘Sebaldian’ inheres in a distinctive interweaving of the creative and the critical staged within the context of travel. Lastly, the essay outlines some specific issues relating to Sebald’s presence in Britain, taking into consideration the particularities of East Anglia as well as his reception by contemporary British ‘psychogeographers’.

Spa towns experienced a boom with the creation of rail lines that brought tourists to the resorts. These customers, beckoned by the climate and environment, sought healthful cures and leisurely activities. Resorts like those crafted by François Blanc at Bad Homburg and Monte Carlo exploded in part because they offered gambling, but they also grew because they were able to take advantage of the mechanization of travel in the mid-nineteenth century that developed in tandem with a culture of tourism. Industrialized transportation networks promoted industrialized forms of leisure even as they gestured to healthful living.

At the time of Sebald’s death in December 2001, a cult of all things “Sebaldian” was already emerging among his Anglo-American readership in particular. Since then, his consecration has reached almost hagiographic heights. His reticence in interviews and his reluctance to participate in the promotional circus of literary publishing amplified his posthumous apotheosis. The timing of his death after the release of the English translation of Austerlitz led to his rise beyond art and academia to cult author status. To many readers and even non-readers of his work, Sebald constituted a messianic exemplum of the “good German” and the “prime speaker of the Holocaust”, as well as a model proponent of the nature writing genre. This led to the creation of touristic walking routes that followed in the footsteps of his novels’ narrators, as well as social media reading groups, engendering further abstractions and misconceptions. Parodic articles emulating his style and overblown tributes only fuelled the cult’s fire. The suddenness of Sebald’s rise from obscurity to international stardom late in life, along with his unexpected demise merely half a decade later, ensure his cult status lives on.

The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

Travel was key to Anne Lister’s sense of self and has played an important part in shaping her posthumous reputation. Famously, she was the first amateur to climb the Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838 and died on one of her most ambitious journeys to Russia in 1840. Scholarship on her diaries in the mid-twentieth century highlighted these and other more local travels. Changing social attitudes, which made possible the publication of decoded passages of Lister’s diaries in the 1980s, meant that Lister’s diaries were no longer valued primarily for their social history content. To understand Lister’s life fully we need, I suggest, to investigate more closely how Anne Lister’s diaries can be read as life writing and travel writing. Citing evidence from Lister’s home tours in the 1820s, I will argue that a distinctive female voice such as Lister’s is an important,but until now neglected, element in the recovery of female travel writing, which has been a recent focus for scholars. I will show that descriptions of travel in Lister’s diaries offer both a rich resource for the study of tourism and also contribute to our understanding of her emotional life and relationships.

This chapter examineswhat happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead—when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason; however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech.