Histories and Cultures of Tourism

In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism-related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.

A sweeping social and environmental history, The Riviera, Exposed illuminates profound changes to the physical space that we know as the quintessential European tourist destination. Stephen L. Harp uncovers the behind-the-scenes impact of tourism following World War II, both on the environment and on the people living and working on the Riviera, particularly North African laborers, who not only did much of the literal rebuilding of the Riviera, but also suffered in that process. Outside of Paris, the Riviera has been the most visited region in France, depending almost exclusively on tourism as its economic lifeline. Until fairly recently, we knew a great deal about the tourists, but much less about the social and environmental impacts of their activities, or about the life stories of the North African workers upon whom the Riviera's prosperity rests. The technologies embedded in roads, airports, hotels, water lines, sewers, beaches, and marinas all required human intervention-and travelers were encouraged to disregard this intervention. Harp's sharp analysis explores the impacts of massive construction and public works projects, revealing the invisible infrastructure of tourism, its environmental effects, and the immigrants who built the Riviera. The Riviera, Exposed unearths a gritty history, one of human labor and ecological degradation that forms the true foundation of the glamorous Riviera of tourist mythology.

Unique among historical guides to New York City, this book covers separate waves of immigration from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth-century Irish Potato Famine, from Ellis Island-which, between 1892 and 1954, processed some twelve million newcomers-to the present day, and it ties this history to various sites in the city. These one-of-a-kind guides allow readers to move through time as never before, bringing them face to face with the people and events behind some of America's most important historical landmarks and locations. No other guidebooks draw so much on the first-hand accounts of those involved in the historic events that transpired in the areas covered-making readers feel as if they are experiencing living history.

Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s. By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating Eastern and Western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.

“Alluring Opportunities” examines the lives of African laborers in the tourism industry in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique and the social ascension that many of these workers achieved in spite of demanding conditions. From the origin of the colonial period until its end in 1975, the tourism industry developed on the backs of these laborers and ultimately became an important source of foreign exchange for Portugal. Todd Cleveland explores the daily experiences of local tourism workers in the genesis and expansion of this vital industry with an analytical utility that transcends Africa's borders by complicating the narrative established and reinforced by an expansive body of literature that stresses the exploitation of indigenous tourism workers. He argues that just as foreign tourists embraced the opportunity to travel to various locations in Mozambique, so too did many Indigenous laborers seize opportunities for employment in the tourism industry in an effort to realize social mobility via both the steady wages that they earned and their daily interactions with sojourning clientele. “Alluring Opportunities” reconstructs these workers' lives, highlighting their critical contributions to the local industry, while also prompting a reconsideration of Indigenous labor and social mobility in colonial Africa. As a result, Cleveland reveals new ways of thinking, more broadly, about the ways that tourism shapes processes of empire, interracial interactions, and power relations.