Virtual Lectures

October 17: Who Wants to be a Tourist?

To set ourselves up for the discussions ahead, we explore the distinction between travel and excursioning, and between the identity of the “tourist” and the “traveller,” asking how the adventurous and intrepid traveller has historically been compared (perhaps unfairly?) with the blinkered and uncultured tourist.

October 24: The Birth of the Tourist – The Grand Tour

From the late seventeenth century, elite travellers from Northern Europe, inspired by Classical civilization, took extended tours of the Continent, with Italy as their favoured destination. We explore their motivations, their routes and ways in which the profile of the Grand Tourist changed in the century before the French and Napoleonic Wars.

October 31: Discovering the Delights of Home – The Home Tour

For many travellers, wars that ravaged continental Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution brought an end to the leisurely Grand Tour era and turned attention to the delights of the Home Tour. We explore the contours of the British Home Tour, the influence of Romanticism and the canonical sights and sites that constituted it.

November 7: Getting Around – Transport, Technologies and the Birth of Mass Travel

Who in the nineteenth century didn’t marvel at the power of the Iron Horse, as the railway remade ideas of time and space? In addition to the railway’s transformative power, we explore the earlier expansion of roads and canals, and highlight the changes wrought by steam on waterborne navigation – on rivers, lakes and oceans. We also explore ideas of mobility and immobility in travel, and how class, race, gender, age and other factors figured into experiences of travel as we chart the rapid expansion of the tourism sector in the nineteenth century.

November 14: What Should We See? Guides and Guidebooks

Travellers use both texts and knowledgeable guides to navigate through unfamiliar terrain, impart “local knowledge” and enhance their experiences. We explore how these very different instruments of travel authority developed and have been used.

November 21: A Bed for the Night: The Hotel in History

Hotels offer a place to lay one’s head – and so much more. We explore hotels as travel infrastructures, examine their symbolisms and discuss their diversity of forms as we analyze the meaning of the hotel in modern travel. From modest inns to grand hotels, we ask how these institutions were linked to changing transport networks, financial structures and cultures of travel.

November 28: Colonizing Space – Imperial Travellers and their (Dis)Comforts

Tourists were attracted to colonial spaces. But far from being a straightforward extension of the colonial project or a playground for Western travellers, colonial spaces also offered opportunities for complex social interactions, local entrepreneurialism and intercultural encounters.

December 5:  Does Tourism Take a Holiday? War and Travel

War doesn’t necessary “kill” travel, but it does transform it profoundly. New types of travellers emerge – soldiers, for instance – while many well-established infrastructures such as hotels and railways are mobilized for new uses. We explore these themes, using Britain’s experience of World War I as a case study and mapping out the complex terrain of wartime work and leisure on the home front. We also end our series by reviewing the long history of “getting away from it all” (or at least the impulse to get away) and exploring new directions that the “lure of being elsewhere” has taken in the past few decades. Our discussion includes new frontiers of travel, the widening profile of tourists and the impact of pandemic on travel practices and institutions.

Kevin James is Professor of History at the University of Guelph, where he holds the endowed Scottish Studies Foundation Chair. He is the author of many publications exploring tourism history. He has also appeared on many television programs in Canada and the UK, and as Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph is engaged with academic and community partners in exploring many dimensions of Scottish economic, social and cultural history.