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Eric G.E. Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism. (London: Palgrave, 2015). 304 p. ISBN 978-0-23036964-1.
The tourism industry is booming, but how did one of the largest industries of the world take shape? More than just economically important, leisure travel plays a vital role in defining who we are. Tourism as we know it was shaped by modernity and helped to create the modern world. This is the main argument in A History of Modern Tourism, written by Eric Zuelow, associate professor of European History at the University of New England, USA. A History of Modern Tourism is not only the first handbook on tourism history; it also outlines the importance of tourism for historical research. Zuelow, editor and writer of several works on tourism history and editor-in-chief ofJournal of Tourism History, describes more than two hundred years of tourism history. With an emphasis on the interplay of leisure travel with political, economical, social and cultural factors, the author successfully shows the importance of researching the history of tourism and leisure travel.
How much modern tourism is intertwined with multiple developments of the modern age, for example the invention of steam power and the creation of aircraft, is shown through a historical journey of leisure travel from the eighteenth century to the present day. In ten chapters Zuelow describes how modern tourism was born and became a central component of the modern world. Beginning as an expression of wealth during the Grand Tour, travel evolved in the second half of the eighteenth century under the influence of Romanticism into a longing for escape, according to Zuelow still one of the key elements of travel today. This development in combination with a new approach to consumption would eventually lead to the consumer revolution in which travel became the ultimate goal: travel was and still is about consuming.
New technology was an important factor in the creation of modern travel but changing notions of the individual were influential as well. Leisure travel brought forward ideas about collective identity, common cultural characteristics and distinctions relative to other groups. For example, the post-war consumer culture stimulated by the post-war economic boom made travel from the 1960s a way to express individuality and to reflect self-defined difference. Tourists search...