The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith, and History (review)

This volume is a selection of papers presented in 2004 at the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society conference. Following the editors, the papers’ focus is on the business dimensions of tourism and not on the cultural ones, which today dominate in research. Furthermore, they deal with three themes, which are not in the foreground of scholarly work; namely, place, religion, and communism. This may be true for religious aspects and for tourism in former socialist countries, but of course it is not for commodifying places, which is an element of each tourist business activity.

Whatever, the editors have selected a couple of interesting case studies, which are on a high scholarly niveau and are all based on primary material. Waleed Hazbun tells us in which way Thomas Cook & Sons between the 1870s and 1930s developed Egypt into a tourist destination. One important element was that the Cook steamers at the Nile made the travel more calculable. He interprets his case as according to the enclave model of tourism governed by a dominant agent. So Cook employed a lot of Egyptians; however, he held them dependent. His focus is on the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and the context of French colonial enterprise and patriotism. However, these two articles could possibly have been integrated into one chapter on tourism in Muslim countries. However, Philip Whalen’s excellent contribution of the chapter “Commodifying Place” treats the gastronomical fare of Dijon, which was launched in 1921 in order to market Burgundy and its regional food products.

The chapter “Engaging Religion” starts with Brian Bixby’s narrative on the Shakers’ villages and commodities that became tourist goals since the nineteenth century. For Bixby, behind the enthusiasm for Shaker goods was “a deep need among some Americans to find a past that can help them cope with the present.” Aaron K. Ketchell’s topic is the Silver Dollar City theme park in Missouri, which opened in 1960. In the park, the owners the religious Herschend family, present a successful “melding of faith and frivolity” by bringing together amusement with prayers, gospel performances, and young Christian weekends. Molly Hurley Dépret describes the attempts to revive tourism in Belfast since the 1990s when the religious conflicts in Northern Ireland were soothed by ceasefires and peace talks. Whereas the city administration is ambivalent over marketing the Civil War sites for tourism, the religious communities are going to construct their particular and diverse narratives and tell them to the tourists.

Anne E. Gorsuch opens the chapter on “Marketing communism” with a survey on Soviet tourism in the late Stalin era between 1947 and 1953. The sparse tourist offers were intended to enforce patriotism and to raise hopes that postwar life would improve. Patrick Hyder Patterson looks at the Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, and GDR citizens visiting Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. The official Eastern Bloc tourist publications managed to deal with this highly demanded tourist destination without referring to the particular Yugoslavian model of self-management and the country’s opening to the West. Cuba, which is the topic of Evan R. Ward’s article, was an important place of American investment and tourism between 1898 and 1959. The nationalization after Fidel Castro’s revolution led to a dramatic decline of the tourist business. Since the late 1980s, the Cuban government again opened tourism for investors from Europe, in particular from Spain, which successfully built hotels and trained Cuban employees.

All considered together, the sampler offers a collection of fine articles. The editors’ approach, however, to bring the contributions together under the headlines “Commodifying Place”, “Engaging Religion”, and “Marketing Communism” does not convince because the articles are too diverse. More successful could have been the editors by getting the authors integrate economic considerations and data like the interplay of supply and demand, tourist numbers, prices, and revenues. Unfortunately...