Tourism and the British Empire

This essay asks what can the scholarship analysing various tourism activities within the British Empire, during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837-1910), contribute to the historiographies of British tourism. Through compiling and comparing a variety of touristic activities within the Empire, it argues that those case studies reveal the importance of said Empire as a contributor to (and a beneficiary of) tourism as an industry. Colonial governments, with some help from private companies, were responsible for the reliable transportation services and recreational infrastructures that allowed for the tourism industry to thrive in a plethora of spaces throughout the Empire. Some of these tourism sites were also instruments for white business owners and employers to accrue profits without sharing any of them to their nonwhite subordinates. Others were a means to impart the tropes that would lead visitors to support the existence of the Empire - ideas such as the inferiority of nonwhite “races”, the intrepid white male adventurer, and the concept of the “civilising mission”.. However, this essay also suggests some degree of caution towards this understanding between tourism and the British Empire. Tourist attractions were not always successful in imparting their imperialistic messages to their customers, and some of them only began to be significant until after the Edwardian Era. In addition, the tourists might not even care about what those places wanted to express, and may have experiences that the attractions may have never intended. They traveled because they wanted a brief escape from their rapidly industrialising places of origin. The historiography of British tourism, or how Britain contributed to the phenomenon of tourism, covers a vast array of topics and questions. Scholars have discussed the multiple meanings of the words ‘tourist’ and ‘tourism’, and what made those two distinct from other people who moved from place to place - like for religious pilgrimage or for 1 trade.1 To be a tourist, some of them concluded, is to travel to places outside of one’s home for the purposes of self-cultivation, leisure and (temporary) escape from one’s place of origin.2 Other works attempted to differentiate between ‘modern’ tourism from its past counterparts. Herodotus may have traveled to Athens and Babylon for pleasure, one arguments goes, but the difference between him, the Grand Tour and its ‘modern’ counterpart concerns scale and affordability. That is, more Britons of modest economic backgrounds during the Victorian Era had more means of venturing to other parts of the United Kingdom (and beyond) than their Grand Tour or antiquity counterparts.3 Academics have also specified the factors that would have prompted British individuals to become tourists. They agreed that tourism was a reprieve for Britons from the overall restrictiveness of Victorian society and from the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of their homes.4 Furthermore they utilised a highly specific set of terms like “sublime”, “romantic”, and “picturesque” to capture how tourists are perceiving their surroundings during their travels.5 Eric Zuelow, A History Of Modern Tourism (London: Palgrave, 2016), 1-14 ; Stephen Prikett. “Circles and Straight Lines - Romantic Versions of Tourism” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 70-71; John Walton, “British Tourism Between Industrialisation and Globalisation: An Overview” in The Making of Modern Tourism, 113-115. 1 2 F. Robert Hunter, "Tourism And Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise On The Nile, 1868– 1914", Middle Eastern Studies, 40.5 (2004), 29. Zuelow, 1-14; 3; Hunter, 29-31. Zuelow, 5-6 and 15-30. Peter Lyth, "Carry On Up The Nile: The Tourist Gaze And The British Experience Of Egypt, 1818-1932", in The British Abroad Since The Eighteenth Century, Volume 1: Travellers And Tourists (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 179-180; Edward MacDonald, "A Landscape . . . With Figures: Tourism And Environment On Prince Edward Island", Acadiensis, 40 (2019), 71; Nikita Vanderbyl, "‘The Happiest Time Of My Life …’: Emotive Visitor Books And Early Mission Tourism To Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves", Aboriginal History Journal, 41 (2017), 96 and 99; Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach” in The Making of Modern Tourism, 4-5. 4 5 Gerhard Stilz, “Heroic Travelers - Romantic Landscapes: The Colonial Sublime in Indian, Australian and American art and Literature” in The Making of Modern Tourism, 85-107; Zuelow, 30-44; Berghoff and Korte, 5. 2 What this essay aims to add to this historiography by considering case studies of tourist sites not within the British nation-state, but inside the overall British Empire. Charles Reed documented the ways in which members of British royalty traveled to various parts of the Empire to create a shared British imperial culture.6 Other works of scholarship focused on the creation and meanings of various expeditions, beginning with the 1851 Great Expedition in London, that showcased certain regions under imperial control.7 But tourists - not just British ones - have traveled great distances to visit the many parts of the Empire during its expansion in the nineteenth century. Easily the most famous of these tourism activities at that time was the package holidays in Egypt offered by Thomas Cook and Son, both before and after the British occupation of the region in 1882.8 But tourists also made appearances in places far from the United Kingdom like the British Raj, Australia, Canada, and the various British colonies in Africa (besides Egypt). The existence of such touristic activities in so many parts of the Empire made the author wonder why scholar John Walton, a historian of tourism, neglected to mention those case studies in his book chapter discussing British tourism abroad and in the context of globalisation!9 Currently the scholarship specifically discussing the relationship between tourism and empire is less extensive, because these works incorporate examples and case studies 6 Charles Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects And The Making Of A British World, 1860-1911 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 7 Alexander Geppert, “True Copies Time and Space Travels at British Imperial Expeditions, 1880-1930” in The Making of Modern Tourism, 223-248; Daniel Stephen, “'The White Man's Grave’: British West Africa And The British Empire Exhibition Of 1924–1925", Journal Of British Studies, 48.1 (2009), 102-128. Hunter, 28-54; Lyth, 176-193; Waleed Hazbun, "The East As An Exhibit: Thomas Cook And Sons And The Origins Of The International Tourism Industry In Egypt", in The Business Of Tourism: Place, Faith And History (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 3-33. 8 9 Walton, 121-124. Also see the lack of reference to the British Empire in Berghoff and Korte, 1-4. 3 beyond the British Empire.10 They discussed how the tourism industry was a means to project American affluence and power in the twentieth century, or how tourism was a means to educate Italians of their own homeland and empire during Mussolini’s rule.11 But works like Eric Zuelow’s A History of Modern Tourism and the “Tourism and Empire” roundtable arrive at some general findings that are of use to this essay. Firstly, they argue that empire is responsible for the political conditions and infrastructures that facilitate the movement of peoples (and tourists) into other parts within itself.12 Secondly, they frame tourism as a means with which empire could exploit local resources from their nonmetropolitan territories. That is, the industry may result in some measure of economic development in a colony or protectorate, but most of the proceeds only end up in the hands of white owners. Local nonwhite actors, on the other hand, can only remain in the lowest and most menial positions within the tourism businesses.13 Thirdly, tourism activities within the empire becomes a vehicle with which to socialise tourists (from within the Empire or from out of it) into accepting the ideological frameworks and assumptions that made the empire itself palatable, if not desired.14 To discern the possible contributions that studying tourism in the British Empire can offer to current understanding of British tourism history, it utilises the insights that scholars have already provided from those two bodies of historiographical literature. It first investigates how various levels of the state - colonial governments and provincial governments especially - organised the systems, the transportation routes, and the See Shelley Baranowski and others, "Tourism And Empire", Journal Of Tourism History, 7.1-2 (2015), 1-31. 10 11 Christopher Endy, "Travel And World Power: Americans In Europe, 1890-1917", Diplomatic History, 22.4 (1998), 565-594; R.J.B. Bosworth, "Tourist Planning In Fascist Italy And The Limits Of A Totalitarian Culture", Contemporary European History, 6.1 (1997), 1-25. 12 Zuelow, 91-112 ; Hunter, 45; Baronowki and others, 1-8. 13 Baranowski and others, 8-10 and 25-26; Hunter, 32. 14 Hunter; 45; Baranowski and others, 8-17. 4 infrastructures that connected them to the British metropole and/or other nation-states, thus allowing tourists to visit their spaces and benefit from their stay. It then asks whether such touristic activities became exploitative towards its nonwhite workforce, an assertion made by scholars studying tourism within the context of empires. In this question the evidence is divided, since some former parts of the British Empire only began to see expansions in their tourism industries during time periods outside of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Finally, it will ask what are the primary messages these tourist sites wanted to impart on their visitors. This essay finds that while some tourism sites did advance certain ideological assumptions that would convince their visitors into supporting the overall British imperial project, tourists also found meanings in their travels that have little to do with empire. That is, they wanted to visit places largely untouched by the urbanisation that they were witnessing from home; to visit places like Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia was to glimpse into an idyllic, rural British past that they felt nostalgia for. The examples and case studies provided from this essay will come from many parts of the British Empire during the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (1837-1910), but it will use examples from Egypt, Australia and Canada the most often. Most of the tourists that this essay will study will comprise of “whites” from within and without the Empire - White British, settler Australians, white Canadians, with some Americans. Britain during the nineteenth century witnessed the introduction, or at least the increased use, of both the steamship and the steam locomotive as a mode of transportation. But their use within its empire depended less on technological detail and more on the necessary political arrangements to make them accessible and reliable. As the white settlers of colonial Australia and New Zealand found out, companies like the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) were reluctant to service them with their ships; to do so while ferrying important items like mail and additional migrants 5 (and perhaps tourists) would risky unprofitability.15 Therefore, as Frank Broeze documented, those two colonies had to offer monetary incentives to those private actors, to establish “steam shipping… at times and on routes where this otherwise might not have been possible at all, or where the quality of the service offered would have been of a much lower quality”.16 From the 1840s onward they went through a series of contracts and agreements with both local and non-local shipping companies, finally settling on a group of domestic companies like Anderson’s and Green’s that compete with one another for subsidies.17 The colonial Bahamas also wrestled with this same problem. So it agreed to a contract in 1859, with Canadian shipping magnate Samuel Cunard, that would link it to New York - in exchange for a subsidy worth at least 3000 pounds.18 The colony of Prince Edward Island, in desperate need for funds to complete a railway project it started in 1871, decided to join the Canadian Federation in 1873 - reversing its political decision to stay out of it only seven years ago. Reliable transport services to and from parts of the British Empire may be a necessary requirement for the development of local tourism, but alone they were not enough. The industry required hotels to house temporary visitors and other infrastructures necessary to make their stay safe and predictable, and the sources of these projects also came from both private and public initiatives. The vast sums of money and effort into making Egypt into a large tourism resort - before, during and after British occupation in 1882 - by Thomas Cook and Sons is the most extensive example of such an endeavour. Besides transporting tourists with its steamship fleet to different Egyptian cities, and 15 Frank Broeze, "Distance Tamed: Steam Navigation To Australia And New Zealand From Its Beginnings To The Outbreak Of The Great War", The Journal Of Transport History, 10 (1989), 4. 16 Ibid., 2. 17 Ibid., 2-13. 18 John Bounds, "The Bahamas Tourism Industry: Past, Present And Future", Revista Geográfica, 88 (1978), 6 housing those customers in its vast line of hotels, the company also laid down a vast network of street signs and offices to guide them and make their travels safer and more predictable.19 To quote a tourist at the time, “the very name Cook becomes in Egypt a magic talisman securing in all who trust in it immunity from proud and protection from rudeness, incivility [and petty annoyances of any kind”.20 The Bahamas had a combination of state and private actors since its colonial government built the Royal Victoria Hotel in 1861 and saw the construction of the Colonial Hotel in 1901, the latter courtesy of American industrialist and Florida East Coast Railway founder Henry Flagler.21 But admittedly, sometimes the distinction between a governmental actor and a nongovernmental one might be non-existent. The 1904 construction of a resort near Victoria Falls in northwestern Rhodesia (and a bridge near the site in 1905) was an initiative from the British South Africa Company, an amalgamation of mining and commercial interests in the area that also served as the colony’s administrators.22 But the efforts from colonial governments and private actors would not have been possible had it not been for the actions from the level of the British Empire as a geopolitically vast and hegemonic entity. To elaborate on the telling case study in Egypt, the Thomas Cook and Son Enterprise would not have made the inroads it did without the political context in which it found itself in courtesy of the Empire from which it was founded. The Egyptian Viceroy and his government were heavily in debt to mostly English bankers and loaners, thus increasing their receptivity towards the company’s activities in the 19 Hazbun, 17-22; Hunter, 35-37; Lyth, 182-187. 20 Hazbun, 18. 21 Bounds, 171-172. 22 JoAnn McGregor, "The Victoria Falls 1900–1940: Landscape, Tourism And The Geographical Imagination", Journal Of Southern African Studies, 29.3 (2003), 725-726. 7 region.23 But just as important to Egypt’s burgeoning tourism industry were the pre-existing practices of extraterritoriality, the “privileges and immunities enjoyed by [westerners]… [who] could often count upon the backing and support of home governments and their diplomatic representatives when problems and difficulties arose [outside metropolitan Britain]”.24 Cook and Son then expanded further when the Empire decided to hire the enterprise’s steamship fleet to transport troops into Sudan for the Mahdist War.25 The Empire also had its share of infrastructure projects to complement more local initiatives; for example, the hunting safaris in colonial Kenya required the extensive Uganda Railroad built in 1901 to allow the transportation of hunters and hunting equipment from the coastal city of Mombasa to the gaming sites around Nairobi.26 But in certain cases the British Empire’s relationship to a subset of tourism activities could be accidental, perhaps even bordering on the fantastically coincidental. When the Dominion Atlantic Railway attempted to market its “railway tourism”, it advertised that its routes went through the Nova Scotian sites that influenced Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.27 But the inspiration for that work might not have even existed had the British Empire decided against the expulsion of the Acadians from their homes during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The rise of tourism within the British Empire inevitably resulted in some of its industries becoming the dominant economic activity with which the rest of the British colony (or territory) had to revolve itself around. According to some scholars this dynamic 23 Hunter, 35-36. 24 Ibid., 34. 25 Ibid., 38-41. 26 Baranowski and others, 9. 27 Monica MacDonald, "Railway Tourism In The 'Land Of Evangeline'", Acadiensis, 35.1 (2005), 158-180. 8 forced some of the indigenous, nonwhite populations into no other choice but to depend on that one industry for their survival. One telling indicator of this type of colonial exploitation is whether tourism remains a dominant economic sector for former parts of the Empire up to this day, and two case studies within the British imperial context do lend themselves to that interpretation. Egypt fulfils this criteria the best, and F. Robert Hunter documents all the various decisions and arrangements that prioritised the area’s tourism industry - to the benefit of the metropolitan British economy - at the expense of every other economic activity. “Egypt’s economy could grow,” he writes, “but it was not allowed to develop an industrial base”.28 It had to purchase the industrial machinery it needed from British firms and only sent back, besides its tourism services, agricultural products in return.29 Unsurprisingly, the current Egyptian nation-state’s economy follows a very similar contour inherited from the nineteenth-century Khedivate. A similar scenario is also present in colonial Kenya. According to Trevor Simmons, the expensive hunting safaris that the colonial officials set into place, aside from being valuable sources of revenue, were a means to attract a very specific type of settler. That is, they wanted to draw in wealthy whites who enjoyed (and could afford) hunting as a sport and would consider staying behind in the colony to spend their capital on the rest of the local economy. The creation of Kenya’s safari spaces also required the occasionally violent evictions of the indigenous populations that have already settled in those lands. Since World War Two the colony, and later the nation-state after independence in 1963, repurposed their safaris into national parks and conservation sites that catered to less wealthy tourists. But this shift did not change the reality that Kenya, much like Egypt, still has a tourism industry that overshadows most of its other economic sectors - except for agriculture.30 Another 28 Hunter, 46. 29 Ibid., 48. 30 Baranowski and others, 8-10 and 23-25. 9 commonality between these two cases is that the local nonwhite workforce from those places never found themselves in leadership roles. Those positions were under the exclusive purview of white business owners.31 But for every Egypt and Kenya, it also hosted many more tourism sites that never reached that same level of economic prominence that could possibly lead to exploitation. In some cases, the tourism industries within the Empire that began in the Victorian Era did not really witness expansion until well after the Edwardian Era. The Bahamas have constructed its Royal Victoria hotel for tourists in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the colony only managed to draw in a maximum of 500 tourists per year over the entire nineteenth century.32 Colonial Jamaica did not create any legislation related to tourism until 1890, when it passed the Jamaica Hotel Laws, and had to wait until the interwar period for tourist traffic to reach consistently reach into the tens of thousands.33 Other former parts of the British Empire only considered tourism to be a viable economic activity far later than 1910. Plans related to the tourism industry in Botswana only came into existence in the 1970s, shortly after its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966.34 At this same time period, Singapore’s Tourism Board (STB) only began to start operations in 1964, and it first marketed its country as “Instant Asia” before trying on other slogans like “Surprising Singapore” (1980s) and “New Asia Singapore” (1996).35 By the time the STB existed the British Empire already lost a lot of its colonial territory and global hegemony, and the 31 Hunter, 48; Baranowski and others, 10. Also see 32 Bounds, 176. 33 Zuelow, 97-99. Maitseo Bolaane and Ackson Kanduza, "Critical Factors In Cultural Tourism In Botswana", Botswana Notes And Records, 38 (2008), 54-61. 34 35 T.C Chang and S.Y Lim, "Geographical Imaginations Of ‘New Asia Singapore’", Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86.3 (2004), 165-185. 10 former parts of the Empire had to operate in an entirely new geopolitical and technological context that differed from the Victorian Era. But besides serving as potential sources of profit for white colonisers, tourism activities in the British Empire were a means to socialise tourists into the ideological assumptions that justified the existence of the Empire itself. To visit the parts of the empire is to come into some level of contact with its colonised (nonwhite) subjects, and to learn of their subordinate position within the empire. The tourist’ visits to the Gunai Aborigines near some Christian missions within the Victoria Colony (Australia) were perhaps the most explicit opportunity for them to observe the “dying” or “doomed” race that the missionaries were attempting to “civilise".36 The vast touristic infrastructure from Thomas Cook and Son in Egypt also had the effect of framing the local Egyptians as unwelcome aliens in their own land - so far removed from the glorious ancient ruins and history that they lived next to. To quote Florence Nightingale, who visited Egypt: “Egypt to the European is all but uninhabited. The present race no more disturbs this impression than would a race of lizards, scrambling over the broken monuments of such a star.”37 The bridge near Victoria Falls was a symbol of imperial mastery (through science) over the natural world, and its spaces either contained references to European discoverers or took the English names that those figures gave them.38 Underpinning all these imperialistic narratives of these touristic sites was the common assumption that the those areas did not even have histories to begin with prior to colonisation. They ignored, omitted, and erased the stories and life experiences of the 36 Vanderbyl, 105-107. 37 Hazbun, 18. 38 McGregor, 728-729. 11 local communities who had long-term settlements within those colonies. The Victoria Falls resort never mentioned the Leya people, who have settled around the area for generations and have developed an intricate and complex understanding of the Falls as a site of cleansing and of worship towards ancestral spirits.39 And whenever tourism materials for the Falls had to address the presence of indigenous communities, they only made token references to the Lozi people who historically lived further away from the Falls.40 The first major tourist attractions in the Australian continent were in Ballarat East (site of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion in the Victoria Colony) and the convict foundations in New South Wales and Tasmania. In effect, they have marginalised the life experiences of the local Aborigine groups who have settled on the continent for thousands of years.41 The British Columbian city of Victoria (Canada) attempted to draw in American and East Canadian tourists by declaring itself more “English” than England itself, neglecting the city’s Chinatown (the oldest in all of Canada) and origins as historically Aboriginal territory.42 Yet messages concerning imperialism and racial hierarchy were not the only insights that tourists received or even cared for. Some of these visitors were literary tourists, in the cases of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. That is, they visited those Canadian provinces because they wanted to see the places that inspired famous works like L.M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847).43 But most importantly, these tourism attractions in the British Empire heavily catered to the tourists’ yearnings for a temporary escape to 39 Ibid., 719-724. 40 Ibid., 730-732. 41 Richard White, "British Travellers And The Invisibility Of Australia's Past, 1868-1910", in The British Abroad Since The Eighteenth Century, Volume 1: Travellers And Tourists (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 139-158. David Smith, "Imagining Victoria: Tourism And The English Image Of British Columbia's Capital", The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 103.2 (2012), 70. 42 43 Edward MacDonald, 74-76; Monica MacDonald, 158-180. 12 rural, idyllic, and healthy landscapes - the spaces that best represented a nostalgic conception of the past - and away from the urbanising spaces from which the customers came. Prince Edward Island advertised itself as a “working landscape” - not virgin land but rather a comfortable space with cultivated gardens and rolling hills, with salt air that would be beneficial on the tourists’ health.44 The Lake Tyers mission in the Victorian (Australia) colony showcased, besides the “racially inferior” Aborigines, the missionaries’ simple village life which was a stark contrast to “Melbourne’s bustle and dust… the endless strife for dollars, the struggle for fame or gain, the treadmills of society’s occupations” .45 Just as important to this wish fulfilment for idyllic landscapes were reminders of past social orders or mores that were presumably absent in industrialising cities. The 1893 promotional material for the Dominion Atlantic Railway’s “Land of Evangeline” route to Nova Scotia depicted a woman, in traditional garb, standing atop a verdant plain. In doing so it was playing to the audience’s wishes for a return to old gender roles and the natural world, and for women to embody certain virtues that the fictional Evangeline character possessed: passivity, sacrifice and fidelity.46 And the tourism industries within the Empire did not always successfully express or control their intended messages, especially those which implicitly supported the British imperial project. In the 1890s the Dominion Atlantic Railway commissioned local historians in Nova Scotia to connect the history of the Acadians with the Evangeline poem, but the result was a bitter dispute which left writers in a difficult situation. To lend credence to Evangeline’s fictional description of the expulsion would lead to an inevitable conclusion that the Railway company did not want to propagate: that the British Empire brutally led 44 Edward MacDonald, 72. 45 Vanderbyl, 96 and 103. 46 Monica MacDonald, 165-173. 13 the supposedly pure and innocent Acadians to their deaths. Defending the Empire would challenge the veracity of the poem’s version of the event, and the Railway wanted to maintain the historical “authenticity" of that work in the eyes of the tourists so as to make their trips to Nova Scotia more meaningful and appealing.47 Furthermore, not everyone who visited the province as Evangeline tourists was impressed with the scenic views they came to expect.48 Local Nova Scotians also expressed their frustrations towards the stereotypical misconceptions of their home generated by tourism. “We Nova Scotians do not all live in woods”, according to an 1895 issue of the Digby Weekly Courier. “We are not a race shut in mid beauteous nature’s scenes … [and] we resent such misrepresentation”.49 Another case where tourism can pass on unintended experiences and messages is in Victoria (Australia). As stated earlier, the visits to the Lake Tyers and Ramahyuck missions were a means to observe the “civilising mission” directed towards the supposedly inferior “race”. But the person-to-person interactions between the Gunai Aborigines and the Melbourne visitors sometimes resulted in surprisingly close relationships between those two groups. In some cases, especially during a concert or a religious holiday, longlasting friendships developed as a result of the touristic activity.50 Those moments allowed for those two groups to sing hymns and other such songs, to everyone’s enjoyment and enthusiasm.51 Sometimes the Aborigines guided tourists around the premises without the help of the missionaries.52 Female tourists seemed more likely to develop that sort of 47 Ibid., 160-163 and 174. 48 Ibid., 177. 49 Ibid. 50 Vanderbyl, 105-107. 51 Ibid., 95. 52 Ibid., 109. 14 rapport with their Aborigine counterparts, most likely due to a common interest in the natural world and fern collection.53 These interactions between tourists and Aborigines on relatively equal footing contributed towards “counter[ing] [the] simultaneous narratives around presumed racial demise”, but this essay does not want to overstate that case.54 Tourists were ignorant of Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 that forced the Gunai onto reservations and resulted in the traumatising separation of Aborigine families during the process of relocation.55 By ignoring this important piece of context and mistakenly assuming that the Gunai enjoyed their picturesque surroundings like the visitors did, tourists “unconsiously justify colonisation as a moral act; their [Aboriginal] dispossession was now invisible”.56 Yet the existence of these missions, and the varied experiences that the tourists had from visiting them and the Aborigines, questions the scholarship that understands tourism as a medium that merely propagated the racist beliefs justifying the British Empire’s existence. To summarise, what the essay’s case studies reveal is a close yet complicated relationship between the Empire and its tourism industries that some scholars might have ignored or downplayed. The Empire, through geopolitical action and through their myriad colonial and provincial governments, was responsible for the transportation and recreational infrastructures that were necessary for the development of tourism activities and sites within its non-metropolitan areas. These sub-national governments, with varying degrees of success and varying levels of aid from private companies, had to establish reliable transport routes to service their colonies or spaces and construct the hotels to house incoming tourists. These tourism sites in turn attempted to impart the frameworks 53 Ibid., 108. 54 Ibid., 109. 55 Ibid., 105. 56 Ibid., 104. 15 and ideologies underpinning the Empire’s existence, ideas that implicitly or explicitly designated its nonwhite inhabitants as inferior and subordinate members of the British imperial enterprise. Some of them might have also reached the monopsonistic point of informal economic hegemony, becoming the only economic activity that could provide a livelihood for the local (almost always nonwhite) population. In doing so, those industries take advantage of its mostly nonwhite workforce by accruing the profits and leadership positions for white employers and owners. But the suggestion of a symbiotic relationship between tourism and empire is too simple, since these tourism sites were also messy spaces for contestations and contradictions that did not always result in the increased support for British imperialism. Sometimes those tourism industries were too small to make any difference towards the overall imperial project during the nineteenth century. And as the current historical scholarship concerning British tourism would have already noted, the tourists may not have traveled to places like Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia to confirm their own superior station within the Empire. On the contrary, they came as Britons, Canadians, Australians or Americans who wanted to temporarily escape their urbanising environs and bask in the landscapes that reminded them of an idyllically rural, traditional, and pre-industrial past. Sometimes they openly received or confirmed the imperialistic themes and messages from their travels. At other instances, they found new meanings from their visits that neither they nor the tourism sites ever intended. But of course, this essay’s argument is but a small contribution to the overall academic discussion towards British tourism. Thus it would like to end by indicating its methodological shortcomings and suggesting additional topics for further investigation. A book chapter by Michael Christopher Low, which documents how Thomas Cook and Sons transported Hajj pilgrims from India, encapsulates some of the topics that this essay was 16 not able to explore.57 Firstly, it is a reminder that this essay was unable to incorporate some examples of tourism from British India, a regretful omission given the area’s large territory and population within the Empire. If provided more space for analysis, this essay would try to further investigate the activity of game hunting in India, Kenya, and Canada, and how it played a role in the construction of British masculinity.58 Secondly, Low’s focus on religious pilgrims raises the question as to whether a study of British tourism should incorporate a more flexible definition of “tourism”. That is, incorporating the Hajj as a case study could lead to a more complete understanding of the “tourist” experiences that went beyond leisure. Finally, the British Raj’s commission for Thomas Cook and Son, to transport Hajj pilgrims, show that this essay’s treatment of the holidaying company is incomplete. Studying the lesser known activities by Cook and Son in other parts of the Empire, like in India and Palestine, would better delineate its successes and limitations during the Victorian Era in a way that this essay could not provide through analysing the company’s vast base of operations in Egypt. Nevertheless, this essay hopes that its argument and analysis for the importance of studying tourism in the British Empire, as a way to complement the existing historiographies discussing British tourism, remain sound. Michael Low, “'The Infidel Piloting The True Believer’: Thomas Cook And The Business Of The Colonial Hajj", in The Hajj And Europe In The Age Of Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 47-80. 57 58 Zuelow, 96-97 ; Joseph Sramek, "'Face Him Like A Briton': Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, And British Masculinity In Colonial India, 1800-1875", Victorian Studies, 48.4 (2006), 659-680. 17 Bibliography Baranowski, Shelley, Christopher Endy, Waleed Hazbun, Stephanie Malia Hom, Gordon Pirie, Trevor Simmons and Eric Zuelow, "Tourism And Empire", Journal Of Tourism History, 7 (2015), 100-130. Berghoff, Hartmut and Korte, Barbara ed., The Making Of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Bolaane, Maitseo, and Ackson Kanduza, "Critical Factors In Cultural Tourism In Botswana", Botswana Notes And Records, 38 (2008), 54-61. 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