Eric G. E. Zuelow, editor. Touring beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History.

Abstract

At first glance, a book devoted to exploring the transnationalism of tourism seems less than original. We already have many studies, to take just one example, of European elites partaking in the Grand Tours of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of travelers leaving home and crossing borders to explore “foreign lands.” A transnational approach to tourism means more than the movement of people, however, implying a broader, multidirectional flow of information, organization, ideology, material items, and images across borders. “Tourism was bigger than a series of discrete national stories,” Eric G. E. Zuelow argues in the introduction to this interesting edited collection; “it was hardly ever entirely the domain of specific state actors but was often the result of a larger current of developments.” (p. 7) Part one of the book explores the role of the transnational in the creation and evolution of tourist spaces. John K. Walton's essay, “Seaside Resorts and International Tourism,” is a history of European seaside resorts as spaces of “international” encounter and “cultural mixing” (p. 20). Laurent Tissot explores the transnational circulation of the alpine model, specifically the Swiss Alps. Angela Schwarz examines the impact of international exhibitions and world's fairs on the development of mass tourism. Each of these interesting contributions is largely summative, relying primarily, and perhaps understandably, on secondary sources to draw broad conclusions about exchange across multiple countries and time periods. Stephen L. Harp's thoughtful case study of the role of other Europeans, especially Germans, on the expansion of the French nudist resort of Cap D'Agde is the most rooted in a specific time and place. All of these essays are examples of the rewards of doing transnational history, but also of the challenges including the need to do research in multiple languages and about multiple spaces and cultures. One answer is the kind of broad, synthetic scope found here in the contributions on seasides, mountains, and world's fairs. This approach enables the authors to reach across international borders and point the way to important questions for future research, but it can sometimes hide historical specificities, flatten changes over time, and encourage universalizations when complexity is called for.