This introduction revisits the relevant literature in the fields of tourism history, as well as in imperial/global history. Identifying shortcomings in these two research strands, the authors advocate bringing themes and approaches from both historiographical fields into dialogue. They outline the intersections between the development of modern tourism since the mid-nineteenth century and the global expansion of empires over the same time period and identify three important themes in the entangled history of tourism and imperialism: tourism's relationship with colonial infrastructure and development; the contested labour relations underpinning colonial tourism; and tourism as a site of encounters between colonisers and the colonised, as well as of touristic gazes and counter-gazes. Finally, the introduction also situates the individual contributions of the special issue within this broader historiographical framework and indicates how they can show the way towards a fuller understanding of the workings of modern empires and imperialism.

In the late nineteenth century, the highlight of many Europeans’ visit to New Zealand's ‘thermal wonderland’ was a guided tour of Whakarewarewa – the Māori village and adjoining thermal belt. From the outset, the villagers controlled tourism on their land. However, the settler government was also keen to control tourism in the region. This paper examines the villagers’ resistance to the government's attempts to take over. While initially able to mitigate governmental interference, once they lost ownership of the lucrative thermal belt to the Crown, their physical control over this land receded. However, tourist guiding provided village women with the opportunity to enact another form of agency: to retain control over how the land was (re)presented to others. Indeed, the guides created, controlled and shared their representation of Whakarewarewa with large numbers of tourists. Ignoring the government's imposed ‘legal’ boundaries, the guides incorporated ‘sights’ from both Te Arawa and Crown-owned land, thus constructing imagined Whakarewarewa as a single ‘place.’ While the historiography often focuses on tourism as a tool of colonisation, this paper demonstrates that through guiding the women of Whakarewarewa challenged the supposed substantive sovereignty of the Crown and undermined the cultural processes of colonisation.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the United Fruit Company (UFC) convinced tens of thousands of passengers a year to tour the Caribbean aboard its Great White Fleet. Many were awed by the ships’ pristine white hulls, lush interiors, surprisingly cool cabins, and on-deck swimming pools—each a means of both enjoying and mitigating the effects of the tropics. The fleet, along with the company's two hotels in Jamaica, augured a new era of leisurely travel in the Americas, but few grasped the extent to which their stays and the environments they experienced were shaped and conditioned by the preceding infrastructures of imperialist enterprise. Using literature published by the UFC and its subsidiary, Fruit Dispatch, along with travelogues and technical publications, this article looks at the distribution networks used by the United Fruit Company to ferry tourists to the Caribbean and “exotic” produce back to the US. It traces the movements of people and goods on- and offshore and reveals the technologies that connected the comfort of passengers above deck to the health of freight below, as well as the company's architectures of leisure to the infrastructures and violence of extractive industry.

Indonesia's volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia's volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt's method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.

The proliferation of mountain resorts and the establishment of tourist itineraries in late colonial Indonesia reflected and reaffirmed colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender. In the mild mountain climate, Europeans visited hotels reminiscent of European architectural styles, consumed European meals and enjoyed flora and fauna that reminded them of home. The location of these resorts was inspired by nearby natural, cultural, and ethnographic “wonders” that further served to emphasise colonial superiority. As spaces where pseudo-scientific concerns over race, civilisation, and the environment coalesced to legitimise colonial ideology, these mountain resorts were crucial elements in the development of a regional and national tourist network. The infrastructure needed to access these resorts and the identification of tourist destinations in the colonial era laid the foundation for many of Indonesia's contemporary tourist draws. Furthermore, thanks to a targeted international advertising campaign, these sites drew visitors both from within the Netherlands Indies as well from throughout colonial Asia and Oceania. Finally, these tourist networks traversed colonial (national) boundaries and played an important role in the articulation and experience of a shared colonial mindset. This history illustrates the extent to which contemporary tourism is profoundly shaped by the colonial discourse of power and difference.

Scholars working on mandate Iraq have demonstrated the centrality of indiscriminate air power in the British Empire's “policing” tactics, recognising an intimate link between the Royal Air Force and mandatory rule. Less clear, however, is how Iraq's emergence as a node in interwar commercial aviation routes was also the product of British control. Foregrounding the activities of the British airline Imperial Airways (1924–1939) sheds light on the imperial roots of air tourism in Iraq. Using government records and the archives of Imperial Airways—alongside popular press books, magazines, newspapers, and ephemeral promotional material—this article draws attention to how Imperial Airways’ proponents talked about air travel in Iraq both as a boon for the British Empire and as a means of “developing” the mandated state itself. In this latter vein, promoters of “air-mindedness” emphasised Iraq's antiquity for multiple ends. First, and perhaps most obvious, to make it more enticing for tourists. Second, they juxtaposed an image of Iraq as frozen in the past with aviation's modernising potential. Ultimately, in foregrounding civic aviation, this article aims to contribute to the nascent historiography of tourism in Iraq alongside broader debates about transportation infrastructure, culture, and empire in the interwar period.

Tourism in Africa was entangled with colonialism from the start. However, after the Second World War it became an integral part of the colonising powers’ development agenda, albeit one that has received little scholarly attention so far. This presented African states with a serious dilemma when most of them gained independence during the 1960s. On the one hand, tourism promised to stimulate economic growth, provide much needed foreign currency, and create employment opportunities. On the other hand, international tourism had the potential to threaten the economic independence of post-colonial states and perpetuate colonial stereotypes, as well as international and local power imbalances and inequalities. The newly elected governments had to deal with this “colonial baggage.” This article focusses on the transition from colonial to post-colonial tourism in two East African countries, Kenya and Tanzania. I explore how the late colonial government pursued tourism as a development strategy for the region. I also demonstrate how Kenya and Tanzania approached tourism and its colonial legacies in different ways after independence. To trace their respective tourism histories, I draw on published reports and newspaper articles, historical research literature, in particular, from tourism scholars of various disciplines, as well as archival sources.

This afterword provides a critical examination of the historical connections between tourism and empire. To contextualise this discussion, a concise overview is provided of the history of tourism, its entanglements with empire and expansion into a truly global industry in the modern era. This is followed by an analysis that draws on the articles making up this special issue in order to highlight their contributions and connections to the most recent wider literature and in particular the significant themes raised that have thus far been underrepresented in the nascent historiography on tourism and empire. The afterword finishes by providing a strong argument for the necessity of continuing this line of investigation further, with a particular emphasis on the need to understand the double role of tourism as both an instrument of imperial oppression, as well as a site of localised forms of agency and contestation.

Islands have played a much larger role in global history than their small size may suggest. The study of islands, once a part of maritime history, has since 2006 grown into its own interdisciplinary field of “island studies.” The three books analysed in this review all stand to contribute to the new field. The books under review are The Boundless Sea (2019), A World at Sea (2020), and África y sus islas (2021). Island-specific topics advanced by these books include islands as nodes in trade networks, the detrimental influence of colonisation on island environments, the use of islands as locations to escape from slavery, ethnographic descriptions of islands, and indigenous knowledge produced by islanders.

The 1850s and 1860s were a crucial era in the history of East Asia. The opening of treaty ports and advances in information and navigational technologies both generated new commercial opportunities and brought more people and commodities from Europe and America to East Asia. What were the consequences of these political and socioeconomic changes and the resultant spatial interconnections? I argue that spatial interconnections rendered centuries-old nonstate spaces in East Asia increasingly problematic, to the extent of creating international conflicts. To illustrate this, I reconstruct the mutual influence among places constructed by and shown in the lives of the shipwrecked American vessel Rover and its crew in East Asian waters. Their activities embodied how transpacific and East Asian communication and commerce, and the growing treaty port community in China, became entangled with how Taiwanese aborigines managed their interaction with the outside world. In this and similar borderland incidents, spatial interconnections between central and peripheral East Asia constructed by ordinary people crossing borders, and the problems arising from such interactions, led to the problematization of peripheries in the 1860s.