Page 64 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

tourism 1841

and business encounters, and travel to fulfill a variety of Recent research has challenged the decisive role of the
social obligations. Although we may well associate a Grand Tour in the history of modern tourism. Studies of
measure of homogenizing effects with the more recent European lower-class and emergent middle-class forms of
capitalization and globalization of some modern tourism leisure and travel activities have begun to suggest that
practices, it is just as likely that contemporary local and these forms of tourism might have much more inde-
even national tourism behaviors and preferences still pendent origins than had been imagined. Such studies
owe much to the touring histories of specific places. have explored the association of new forms of travel,such
as bicycle and automobile transport, with distinct new
Variants of Class, Gender, working-class travel and tourism traditions. Other re-
and Race search has focused on the places occupied by bourgeois
A popular conception of the origins of modern tourism tourists,pointing to the unique origins and distinctly class-
has linked tourism history almost exclusively to preced- based purposes of newly fashioned, accessible tourist
ing elite travel traditions. In the West this conception has regions and resorts as well as specific facilities,such as the
drawn our attention to such phenomena as the European establishment of nineteenth-century drinking halls in Ger-
Grand Tour, particularly with the seventeenth-to- many and, much later, the advent of low-cost motels and
nineteenth-century travels of wealthy English and French camping facilities in the United States and elsewhere.
people to “high culture” places in southern Europe and to Research devoted to the history of working-class sea-
some extent also to the “Orient” of Near Eastern locales. side resorts has been particularly productive and can help
Emphasis on this precursor to modern tourism is under- us better understand why we should pay attention to how
standable. Elite partakers of the Grand Tour were encour- tourism relates to different class interests. For example,
aged to keep self-revelatory accounts of their travels, and earlier summaries of tourism history have often con-
their journals and books represent a major contribution cluded that the individualistic and rather romanticized
to the literature of tourism, helping in many respects to motives for travel embodied in the elite Grand Tour, such
shape our attitudes concerning its origins. as the opportunity for self-discovery and cultural improve-
ment, must form the standard
by which we might judge all
subsequent forms of tourism.
In this light people often view
later forms of “mass tourism”
and vacationing as aberrations
of the more original motives of
tourism, representing failed
and superficial attempts to

An American family
arrives for a cultural
vacation in Venice, Italy,
in July 2003. Once a
major trading port,
Venice is now a major
tourist attraction.