Tourism in the Middle East: concluding thoughts

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Waleed Hazbun for inviting me to participate in this special issue, as well as to Dylan Baun, Janina Santer, Nadya Sbaiti and Laith Shakir who shared their inspiring contributions with me. My sincere thanks go to Waleed Hazbun and Eric Zuelow for their valuable comments and questions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Edward William Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1978]). Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens (München: C.H. Beck, 1998).

2 Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Worlds of the Bourgeoisie’, in The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire, ed. Christof Dejung, David Motadel and Jürgen Osterhammel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Cf also Christof Dejung, ‘Auf dem Weg zu einer globalen Sozialgeschichte? Neuere Studien zur Globalgeschichte des Bürgertums’, Neue Politische Literatur 59, no. 2 (2014).

3 Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, no. 3 (2001).

4 F. R. Hunter, ‘Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 5 (2004), 31–6. Colette Zytnicki, L'Algérie, terre de tourisme: Histoire d’un loisir colonial (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016), 36–41. Andrew Humphreys, Grand Hotels of Egypt in the Golden Age of Travel (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011). Dennison Nash, ‘The Rise and Fall of an Aristocratic Tourist Culture: Nice, 1763–1936’, Annals of Tourism Research 6, no. 1 (1979), 65–71.

5 Hend Chébli, ‘Evolution d’un centre d’estivage au Liban (Bikfaya)’ (MA Thesis, Département de géographie, Université libanaise, 1971). Marie Sawaya, ‘Un centre d’estivage libanais: Dhour Choueir’ (MA Thesis, Faculté de lettres, Université libanaise, 1963).

6 Eric G. E. Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism (London, New York: Palgrace Macmillan, 2016), 95–102.

7 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Derek Gregory, ‘Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839–1914’, in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel’, in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James S. Duncan and Derek Gregory (London, New York: Routledge, 1999). John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2011).

8 Zytnicki, L'Algérie, terre de tourisme, 117–20, 127. Colette Zytnicki and Habib Kazdaghli, ‘Introduction’, in Le Tourisme dans l'Empire Français: Un outil de la domination coloniale? Politiques, pratiques et imaginaires, XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Colette Zytnicki and Habib Kazdaghli (Saint-Denis: Publications de la Société française d'histoire d'outre-mer, 2009), 10–11.

9 Hunter, ‘Tourism and Empire’, 39.

10 Erez Manela, ‘Dawn of a New Era: The ‘Wilsonian Moment’ in Colonial Contexts and the Transformation of World Order, 1917–1920’, in Competing Visions of World Order: Global Historical Approaches, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

11 Susan Pedersen, ‘The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (2006). Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

12 Cf Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘The Great Work of Uplifting Mankind‘: Zivilisierungsmissionen und Moderne’, in Zivilisierungsmissionen: Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005).

13 Jasmin Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, 1920–1930s, (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2023), 137–8, 215–7.

14 Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 335–9.

15 Charles S. Maier, ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’, American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000), 808. Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 236–42, 288.

16 Waleed Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16–19.

17 Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, 6. Carmelo Pellejero Martínez, ‘La Politica Turistica En La España Del Siglo XX: Una Vision General’, Historia Contemporánea, 2 (2002), 243–4.

18 Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor, ‘Tourism and the Making of Socialist Yugoslavia: An Introduction’, in Yugoslavia's Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s), ed. Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 13–16. Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, 84–6, 127–30.

19 Cf L. L. Wynn, Pyramids & Nightclubs: A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 1-5.

20 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). In North Africa, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique played a major role: Habib Kazdaghli, ‘L'Entrée du Maghreb dans les circuits du tourisme international: Le rôle précurseur de la Compagnie Générale Transatlantique’, in Le Tourisme dans l'Empire Français: Un outil de la domination coloniale? Politiques, pratiques et imaginaires, XIXe–XXe siècles, ed. Colette Zytnicki and Habib Kazdaghli (Saint-Denis: Publications de la Société française d'histoire d'outre-mer, 2009).

21 Matthew Gray, ‘Economic Reform, Privatization and Tourism in Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 2 (1998), 93.

22 Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 195, 210.

23 Cf. also Zeina Maasri, ‘Troubled Geography: Imagining Lebanon in 1960s Tourist Promotion’, in Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization, ed. Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016) A contrasting example is Tunisia: Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts.

24 Eric G. E. Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism, 134–48.

25 Michael Berkowitz, ‘A ‘New Deal’ for Leisure: Making Mass Tourism During the Great Depression’, in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, ed. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

26 Orvar Löfgren, ‘Know Your Country: A Comparative Perspective on Tourism and Nation Building in Sweden‘, in Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere. Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Herndon: Smithsonian, 2013).

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

28 Valene L. Smith, ed., Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). On an alternative approach cf. Laurajane Smith, ‘The Cultural ‘Work’ of Tourism’, in The Cultural Moment in Tourism, ed. Laurajane Smith, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (London, New York: Routledge, 2012).

29 Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

30 Cf Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 223–4.

31 Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 28–9.

32 Uri Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate for Palestine, (Leiden, New York: Brill, 1987), 133. Sarah Irving, ‘ ‘Indian Lady Tourists Killed at Jericho’: Tourism, Pilgrimage and South-South Relations in Interwar Palestine’, unpublished presentation at the conference Vocabularies of Tourism: Language, Photography, and Tourism in Palestine, Leiden, 1–3 June 2022.

33 Andrea L. Stanton, 'Locating Palestine's Summer Residence: Mandate Tourism and National Identity', Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 2 (2018).

34 Matthew Gray, ‘The Political Economy of Tourism in Syria: State, Society, and Economic Liberalization’, Arab Studies Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1997): 60–5, 69–70. Gray, ‘Economic Reform, Privatization and Tourism’, 105–6. Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts, 50–76.

35 Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 138–9.

36 Maasri, ‘Troubled Geography’, 133.

37 Sasha D. Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship. Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 194.

38 Rachel Mairs, From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and His Clients, 1885–1933 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Stephen L. Harp, The Riviera, Exposed. An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022). Todd Cleveland, Alluring Opportunities: Tourism, Empire, and African Labor in Colonial Mozambique, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023). I am grateful to Eric Zuelow for having pointed out Cleveland’s monograph to me.

39 Huber, Valeska. ‘Multiple Mobilities: Über den Umgang mit verschiedenen Mobilitätsformen um 1900‘. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, no. 2 (2010). Kozma, Liat, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer, eds., A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1940 (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

40 Camila Pastor, ‘Performers or Prostitutes? Artistes During the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon, 1921–1946’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 13, no. 2 (2017). Daam, Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States, 296–99.

41 Patrizia Battilani and Francesca Fauri, ‘The Rise of a Service-Based Economy and Its Transformation: Seaside Tourism and the Case of Rimini’, Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 1 (2009).

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Jasmin Daam

Jasmin Daam is an independent scholar interested in colonial and global history, the history of the modern Middle East, and the history of travel and tourism. She is the author of Tourism and the Emergence of Nation-States in the Modern Eastern Mediterranean, 1920s–1930s (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2023). Since 2016, she has been a member of the research network ‘The Modern Mediterranean: Dynamics of a World Region, 1800-2000’. E-Mail: [email protected].