The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith, and History

Emphasizing the economic and cultural dimensions of travel, The Business of Tourism explores the enterprises and technologies of tourist activity with a particular focus on tourism as a phenomenon through which nations, regions, and individuals produce and consume experiences. The volume is divided into three sections. "Commodifying Place" examines how tourist enterprises have helped to create a distinctive sense of identity for specific locales. "Engaging Religion" addresses the ways in which religion and religious travel have been marketed. "Marketing Communism" explores the role of tourism in buttressing ideas and attitudes in communist settings.

The essays in The Business of Tourism present a vigorous, novel, and empirically grounded vision of tourism as a local and global enterprise from the 1860s to the 1990s. They transport readers from Egypt in the 1860s, where Thomas Cook & Son laid the foundations for international mass tourism, to Burgundy's gastronomic festivals between the two world wars; from Branson, Missouri, to Belfast, Ireland, in an examination of religion in sightseeing; and in the final leg of the journey, from the Stalinist Soviet Union to post-Soviet Cuba, to see the changing relationship between marketing and communism. Taken together, the essays link the cultural practice of tourism to the businesses that create cultural experiences.

Philip Scranton is Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden, and Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library. His books include Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies and Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History. Janet Davidson is Historian at the Cape Fear Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina. She is coauthor of On the Move: Transportation and the American Story.