Tourism and the making of the modern Middle East

ABSTRACT

Since its inception the Journal of Tourism History has sought to expand the interdisciplinary field of tourism history to include scholarship from and about regions such as the Middle East. This special issue on ‘Tourism and the Making of the Modern Middle East’ is based on a conference sponsored by the Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society (SERMEISS) and held at the University of Alabama in 2022. While mostly focused on developments in Lebanon and Iraq before they gained independence from France and Britain, the essays explore how national actors used tourism to integrate populations within the newly formed political entities of the Mandate era into viable nation-states and to position these emerging states within the international framework defined by expanding tourism economies. Together these studies show how tourism and its impacts in the Middle East are multilayered, transnational processes within and across the emerging territorial nation-states of the region.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 John K. Walton, ‘Welcome to the Journal of Tourism History’, Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 1 (2009): 4.

2 John K. Walton, ‘Seaside Tourism on a Global Stage: “Resorting to the Coast: Tourism, Heritage and Cultures of the Seaside”, Blackpool, UK, 25–29 June 2009’, Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 2 (2009): 152.

3 See Eric G.E. Zuelow, R.J. Morris, Alastair J. Durie, Allan Brodie, Susan Barton and Kevin J. James, ‘A Thank You to John K. Walton on his Retirement’, Journal of Tourism History 5, no. 3 (2013): 225–37.

4 Walton, ‘Seaside Tourism on a Global Stage’, 152. The presentation would later be published as ‘Modernity on the Beach: A Postcolonial Reading from Southern Shores’, Tourist Studies 9, no. 3 (December 2009): 203–22.

5 Eric G.E. Zuelow, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Journal of Tourism History 7, no. 1–2 (2015): 3.

6 See, Andrea L. Stanton, ‘Locating Palestine’s Summer Residence: Mandate Tourism and National Identity’, Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 2 (2018): 44–62.

7 Jasmin Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, 1920–1930s (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2023).

8 Bertram M. Gordon, ‘Touring the Field: The Infrastructure of Tourism History Scholarship’, Journal of Tourism History 7, nos. 1–2 (2015): 136.

9 Gordon, ‘Touring the Field’, 137. See also John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

10 See, for example, Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997).

11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Derek Gregory, ‘Colonial Nostalgia and Cultures of Travel: Spaces of Constructed Visibility in Egypt’, in Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage, ed. Nezar Alsayyad (London: Routledge, 2001).

12 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours; Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991).

13 See, for example, Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds., Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (London: Routledge, 1990); Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michael J. Reimer, ‘Views of Al-Azhar in the Nineteenth Century: Gabriel Charmes and 'Ali Pasha Mubarak’, in Travellers in Egypt, ed. Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).

14 F. Robert Hunter, ‘Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 5 (2004): 28–54; F. Robert Hunter, ‘The Thomas Cook Archive for the Study of Tourism in North Africa and the Middle East’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 36, no. 2 (2003): 157–64. See also Baranowski, Shelley, Christopher Endy, Waleed Hazbun, Stephanie Malia Hom, Gordon Pirie, Trevor Simmons, and Eric G.E. Zuelow, ‘Tourism and Empire’, Journal of Tourism History 7, no. 1–2 (2015): 100–30; Debbie Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

15 Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 64–92; Waleed Hazbun, ‘The East as an Exhibit: Thomas Cook & Son and the Origins of the International Tourism Industry in Egypt’, in The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith, and History, ed. Philip Scranton and Janet F. Davidson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3–33.

16 Mohamed Bergaoui, Les Années Régence. Tourisme et voyages en Tunisie (Tunis: SIMPACT 1996); Ellen Furlough, ‘Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France’, French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441–75; Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Kenneth J. Perkins, ‘The Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and the Development of Saharan Tourism in North Africa’, in The Business of Tourism. Place, Faith, and History, ed. Philip Scranton and Janet F. Davidson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 34–55.

17 Doron Bar and Kobi Cohen-Hattab, ‘A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 131–48; Kobi Cohen-Hattab, ‘Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool’, Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 61–85; Sarah Irving, ‘“This is Palestine”: History and Modernity in Guidebooks to Mandate Palestine’, Contemporary Levant 4, no. 1 (2019): 64–74.

18 Susan Nance, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the American Flag: Patriotic Travel before the Age of Package Tours, 1830–1870’, Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 1 (2009): 7–26

19 Martin Anderson, ‘The Development of British Tourism in Egypt, 1815 to 1850’, Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 3 (2012): 259–79.

20 Stephanie Malia Hom, ‘Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911–1943’, Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 3 (2012): 281–300; Patrick Young, ‘Tourism Empire and Aftermath in French North Africa’, Journal of Tourism History 10, no. 2 (2018): 183–200; Patrick Young, ‘Dislocations of Empire: Colonies de Vacances and Estivage in Protectorate Morocco, 1912–1955’, Journal of Tourism History (forthcoming 2024).

21 Paul T. Nicholson, ‘Early Twentieth Century Tourism and Commercial Photography in Egypt and the Holy Land’, Journal of Tourism History 14, no. 3 (2022): 263–90; Paul T. Nicholson and Steve Mills, ‘Soldier Tourism in First World War Egypt and Palestine: The Evidence of Photography’, Journal of Tourism History 9, nos. 2–3 (2017): 205–22.

22 Elif Bayraktar Tellan, ‘Pera Inns: The Emergence of Hosting as a Business in Istanbul in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Tourism History 8, no. 2 (2016): 127–46; Enas Fares Yehia, ‘Promotion of Tourism in Egypt During the Reign of King Fuad I’, Journal of Tourism History 13, no. 3 (2021): 275–89.

23 Almahdi Alrawadieh, and Zaid Alrawadieh. ‘Tracing the Ottoman Caravansaries along the Road between Bilād Al-S̲hām and Istanbul’, Journal of Tourism History 13, no. 3 (2021): 229–48.

24 Enas Fares Yehia, Hessa Jamaan M. Alzahrani, Donald Malcolm Reid and Mohamed Ahmed Ali, ‘Tourism, National Identity, and the Images on Postage Stamps: The Case of Saudi Arabia’, Journal of Tourism History 14, no. 1 (2022): 70–102.

25 Judith Rowbotham, ‘“Sand and Foam”: The Changing Identity of Lebanese Tourism’, Journal of Tourism History 2, no. 1 (2010): 39–53; Robert Steele, ‘Iran’s Golden Age of Tourism: The Development of the Travel Industry in the Late Pahlavi Period (c. 1960–1979)’, Journal of Tourism History 14, no. 3 (2022): 239–62.

26 Evan R. Ward, ‘Before Dubai: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Iranian Tourism Development, 1967–1969’, Journal of Tourism History 11, no. 1 (2019): 46–62.

27 On the relationships and contrasts between ‘Western’ tourism and regional tourism in the Middle East, see L. L. Wynn, Pyramids & Nightclubs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Ala Al-Hamarneh and Christian Steiner, ‘Islamic Tourism: Rethinking the Strategies of Tourism Development in the Arab World After September 11, 2001’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 173–82.

28 The collection is now held by the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. See https://leicestershirecollections.org.uk/working-life/the-thomas-cook-collection.

29 See also César Jaquier, ‘Motor Cars and Transdesert Traffic: Channeling Mobilities Between Iraq and Syria, 1923–1930’, in Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918–1946, ed. Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

30 On the shift from mountain to coastal tourism in Lebanon, see Zeina Maasri, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 46–51.

31 Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Waleed Hazbun, ‘Aviation, Hijackings, and the Eclipse of the “American Century” in the Middle East’, in Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis, ed. Daniel Bertrand Monk and Michael Sorkin (New York: Urban Research/OR Books, 2021), 223–47.

32 Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States.

33 Eric G. E. Zuelow, email correspondence to Jasmin Daam and Waleed Hazbun, 30 April 2024.

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Notes on contributors

Waleed Hazbun

Waleed Hazbun is Richard L. Chambers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama. A scholar of international tourism, Middle East geopolitics, and US foreign policy, he is author of Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minnesota, 2008), co-editor of New Conflict Dynamics: Between Regional Autonomy and Intervention in the Middle East and North Africa (Copenhagen, 2017), and a founding member of the Critical Security Studies in the Arab World working project supported by the Beirut-based Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS). His ongoing research addresses the politics of insecurity and US policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.