Scandia utblick: What is tourism history?

Abstract

Tourism history is witnessing a surge of new research, which means that this is a good time to pause and reflect on the historiographical development of this field over the past decades. This article retraces the genealogy of historical tourism scholarship, revisits some of the classics in the field, and reviews the latest developments in the global historiography on tourism. Furthermore, the article also shows how the field has always engaged in productive, mutual exchanges with other disciplines, including sociology, ethnology, and comparative literature, and with adjacent historical fields such as global history, gender history, and diplomatic history. It also argues that while researchers for a long time were in agreement when seeing tourism as an inherently modern phenomenon, recent research on European antiquity and the Song dynasty has prompted a new debate on the nature of tourism. The empirical emphasis of most tourism history nevertheless remains on the period after 1850, and the article ends by staking out the latest trends in this field, such as the embrace of digital methods and the study of so-called travellees – those on the receiving end of tourism who facilitate or merely witness their home becoming a destination for mass travel.