Mapping an empire: Tourist cartographies of the Caribbean in the early twentieth century

Abstract

Maps played a vital role in the development of US mass tourism in the Caribbean between 1898 and the 1930s. While conveying practical information, tourist maps widely distributed in the United States involved potential and actual tourists in imperial power dynamics at the heart of US hegemony after the Spanish‐American War of 1898. Clothed in the language of leisure lay different, and at times competing, imperialist fantasies. The widespread use of this representational illustrates the nexus between leisure and imperial enterprise in the early twentieth century.