Travel Reference
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HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES
OF TOURISM
Dallen J. Timothy
Introduction
People have undertaken travel away from home for millennia as they mobilised from villages
and tribal units to hunt, trade, explore and conquer. Members of some ancient societies even
travelled for leisure purposes; historical accounts highlight the ancient Egyptians and Romans
travelling for pleasure and sightseeing to the far corners of their empires. From the earliest
times to the modern day, humans have infl uenced the natural landscape and created unique
cultural footprints on the earth through their travels. This chapter describes a handful of ways
in which historical geographical thinking parallels some aspects of modern-day tourism,
including global diasporas and migration, transportation networks and destination develop-
ment, urbanisation and rural landscapes, colonialism and power, and heritage as a tourism
resource.
Historical geography and tourism
Historical geography is perhaps the truest amalgam of all other topic areas of geography. It is
the study of 'the geographies of past times' and is concerned with changes in human and
natural landscapes, forms and functions of human settlements, uses of natural resources, and
the 'exercise of power over territories and peoples' (Butlin, 1993: 1). The sub-discipline aims
to understand the 'processes and developments that have shaped the modern world' (Nash and
Graham, 2000: 1). Historical geography is therefore concerned with almost all elements of
human geography and the tangible and intangible past (Meinig, 1989).
Historical geographers are particularly interested in the development of transportation
systems and human mobility, urbanisation processes, global migration patterns, colonialism
and power, and other ways in which landscapes and the human-environment interactions
have evolved through time. Clearly all of these and many more elements of the past have
salient bearings on modern-day tourism. While historical geography is broad enough to
encompass nearly all aspects of contemporary tourism fl ows, patterns and resources, it is also
specifi c enough to focus on the simultaneity of space and time in the context of tourism
(Cohen-Hattab and Katz, 2001). While the contribution of historical geography to knowl-
edge about tourism is vast, only a few themes are highlighted in the sections that follow.
 
 
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