Nationalism and Tourism since the EighteenthCentury

Serious study of the relationship between nationalism and tourism is only about thirty years old. Today, most historians realise just how connected the two are and that the relationship can reasonably be described as symbiotic. From at least the late eighteenth century, tourism offered a way of presenting nations to members and nonmembers alike. Technologies such as tourist guidebooks told visitors ‘what ought to be seen’, pointing the way toward specific sites, memories, and traditions. Many nationalists saw this utility and strove to use leisure travel to bolster the legitimacy of nation-states. Nations proved equally useful to tourism developers, providing ‘difference’ that was attractive to travellers keen to experience the exotic. This article suggests that study of the nationalism/tourism relationship must not be left there. Recent scholarship shows that the story of nations is transnational, so we need to ask how tourism facilitated that spread. We need to better understand the transnational flow of ideas between national groups. At the same time, scholars also need to examine the evolution of the relationship. How did tourism function in differing national contexts? Was there an evolution over time? This essay provides an outline of that evolution. Using Eric Hobsbawm’s distinction between proto-nationalism, liberal (state-building) nationalism, exclusionary (ethnic) nationalism, and separatist (anticolonial) nationalism, it traces the ways in which tourism served the needs of various types of nationalists, some of whom were actively competing with one-another for the soul of a given national community. Nations must be understood not simply as imagined communities, but as perpetually re-imagined ones. Tourism provides a useful way for exploring how that process played out over the past 300-or-so-years.