‘A land made fit for tourists’: Thomas Cook, tourism promotion, and colonial development in Iraq, 1920–1932

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the British travel firm Thomas Cook & Son's operations in Iraq, threading together the histories of antiquities-focused tourism and development from the country's establishment as a League of Nations Mandate in 1920 through its independence in 1932. It situates the firm's rhetoric within two principles undergirding mandate-era colonial development: development of the land, achieved through the modernisation of transportation infrastructure, and the development of the Iraqi people ‘along native lines’. Journalists, tourism promoters, politicians and travel writers lauded investments in Iraq's railways, automobile transportation and civil aviation infrastructure. They presented visions of Iraq's development as inextricable from its place within regional and global transportation networks. In the same period, a fascination with antiquities resulted in an outpouring of media about ancient Iraqi civilisations. Thomas Cook's cohesive publishing output – from guidebooks and travelogues to ephemeral written and visual sources, including pamphlets, magazines and advertisements – reveals how the company presented Iraq as both a country boasting the latest in modern transportation and hospitality facilities as well as an exotic land of perpetual antiquity. Thomas Cook not only replicated colonial discursive strategies, but also made them legible within the cultural (and seemingly ‘apolitical’) register of leisure travel.