The Making of Modern Tourism

At the end of the 20th century, tourism is the world's largest single industry. Tourism, however, is not only an economic and social phenomenon but can be "read" in semiotic terms centred around dreams of alternatives to everyday life. The images, which today dominate advertisements for tourist products, had to be constructed and sustained, invented and remoulded over a long historical process. It seems that without this distinctive historical and cultural "baggage", the remarkable social practice of taking holidays would not have evolved. Even if tourism saw its most spectacular development in the 19th and 20th centuries in terms of the numbers involved, it rests on a cultural foundation inaugurated in the early modern period. The making of modern tourism was a long term process, deeply rooted in the cultural and intellectual, economic and social history of Britain.