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

Abstract

Essay collections, when compiled as cogently as this volume by Eric G.E. Zuelow, provide fresh perspectives on well-explored historical narratives. In his excellent introduction surveying the existing literature, Zuelow criticises the ‘fairly Anglocentric’ historiography in which concerns over ‘social class’ have dominated discourse (p. 3). Tourism studies over the past twenty years, when the field first emerged as a major focus of analysis, have also remained largely confined to particular nations or ‘geographically bounded areas’ (p. 4). Zuelow pushes an exciting new agenda which transcends the nation to understand better how the globalising tourism industry reached beyond national borders. He divides the collection into three sections, respectively devoted to transnational spaces such as world fairs, national developments and their close relationship to international trends, and, finally, the politicisation of tourism which occurred under National Socialism and Communism. Zuelow has chosen to focus the collection on Europe, demonstrating how tourism evolved from the Grand Tour and Romantics’ pursuit of the sublime in the early nineteenth century to the rise of mass tourism during the twentieth century. Tourism thus ‘occurred amid a complicated matrix of transnational forces’ (p. 4). While the authors in this collection tackle the influence of nationalism and the efforts of the promoters of tourism to compete against international rivals, they beg the question about the influence of imperialism and thus the globalisation of nationalism.