what is colonial tourism

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Tourism, Colonialism, and Disease

A recent bonne nouvelle for the jet-set is that the European Union will be reopening its borders to American tourists . The pandemic put a pause on many people’s travel plans, and despite vaccines not yet having enough distribution or time to truly eliminate the risk of the virus packing a bag and tagging along, the tourism industry is ready for summer vacation. Of course, some places, like Mexico , never ceased to host tourists. Still, despite some think pieces about taking a moment to reassess the value of tourism , it looks like it will emerge from this past year unchanged. Even the UN is desperate for it to come back , calling tourism “one of the world’s most important economic sectors.” This is a waste of an opportunity to reconsider why we travel and what effects it has on others. What some might write off as just a quick trip, or a necessary break for their mental health could carry with it disastrous consequences. There is an inherent problem in tourism of objectifying the places to which we travel—it’s just a beach, a city, a forest. But those places have people in them, locals whose lives are intertwined with the environment the tourist is enjoying, and who are often reliant on the tourists for their livelihood. Those people themselves end up objectified. In this paradigm there are direct parallels to colonialism: these towns and nations are often built up as escapes for the affluent of the Global North, and the objectification of people is often in service of a foreign enterprise. It becomes even clearer that tourists are colonial invaders when they continue to travel knowing they might bring with them an insidious plague. Last summer we saw statues of Christopher Columbus torn down all over the country , and yet this summer people are eager to follow in his footsteps on their way to the largely un-inoculated Caribbean.

The exploitative and extractive economy of Columbus, et al., is still here, but the supply chains have become more complex. Those who have tried to prioritize ethics in their purchases know that it is difficult to source products that are wholly divorced from human suffering or environmental destruction. Still, we need food, we need clothes and shelter, and the difficulty of removing oneself from these supply chains is extreme. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, the saying goes, and I’m not here (nor would I feel qualified) to tell you from whom to buy your bread. What we can live without—however often it may feel otherwise—is a vacation. Leisure travel is an opportunity to take deeper consideration of the ethics of our actions. Travel is an activity where we have an incredible amount of freedom in our choices, where we can, in existentialist terms, more easily transcend our mere facticity. And tourism, even more than capitalism at-large, relies on the same model as colonialism. As Hal K. Rothman puts it in his book, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West:

Tourism is the most colonial of colonial economies, not because of the sheer physical difficulty or the pain or humiliation intrinsic in its labor but because of its psychic and social impact on people and their places. Tourism and the social structure it provides transform locals into people who look like themselves but who act and believe differently as they learn to market their place and its, and their, identity.

Those from wealthy places visit the underdeveloped ones, they bring money, they enjoy what luxury and leisure they desire, and then they leave. They create a dependency among the locals for tourist dollars, and the economy shapes itself, in what I would argue is bad faith, to the benefit of the tourists. The place-in-itself, once “discovered” by enough tourists, becomes a place-for-others. Like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where locals can hardly afford housing because the wealthy tourists have distorted the real estate market . These places are outposts for the colonists, who instead of extracting gold or spices, extract relaxation and novelty. Rather than mine or farm, they ski or sunbathe—but the model remains the same.  Even in a National Park or Forest the location has been altered for visitors; next time you take in a scenic Yosemite vista, consider how many indigenous people had to be removed to create these places “untrammeled by man.” If the removal of native people from their ancestral lands to better facilitate camping trips ( for mostly white people ) isn’t colonial, I’m not sure what is.

These phenomena are not new ones, nor have they changed much. As industrialization brought smog and disease to overcrowded cities a couple centuries ago, the country vacation became de mode , especially since summer temperatures and primitive sewage practices made city air intolerable. So, those with means fled the stench and cholera for the coasts and the mountains. Their money went further among the peasants in the country, where labor and land alike were cheaper. The same behavior returned in 2020 when the wealthiest New Yorkers fled the city as COVID-19 ran rampant , hiding out in their summer homes and family beach houses. They were extracting what they needed from the countryside, the mountains and the beach, leaving little behind except some fleeting revenue and possibly a cloud of highly infectious virus. 

I’m certain the affluent residents of the Upper West Side do not liken themselves to Columbus, but where there once was only an economic parallel between tourists and colonizers, there is now an epidemiological one as well. In their escape from New York, those virus fugitives brought with them an illness to which no one had immunity, and they brought it into towns with little infrastructure to handle diseases, because the colonial economic model does not build community-based infrastructure. It builds parking lots, hotels, restaurants, gift shops and bars, but it doesn’t build hospitals of sufficient capacity. After all, while summer populations can double or triple the population of a beach town, most vacationers don’t end up visiting the hospital.  The same goes for ski towns in winter, as isolated Sun Valley, Idaho saw when their COVID-19 infection rate spiked in April 2020, when affluent travelers fled to their condos and chalets. In colonialism there is no real investment in the colony other than what is needed to extract the colonist’s preferred product—whether that be sugarcane or a sun-tan. The colonized are largely considered expendable.

This is why I hope this summer doesn’t see a resurgence of proposals like the TRIP act and the Explore America tax credit , both stimulus programs intended to subsidize and increase tourism. These ideas originated from hotel and restaurant association lobbyists, not from healthcare professionals, and not from hotel and restaurant employees. In hindsight we can say with no doubt that the TRIP act, which offered a $4000 per adult tax credit for money spent on vacations more than 50 miles away from one’s home, would have directly incentivized the spread of COVID-19. One might ask why, if so much money is there to be distributed, we don’t just give it to the workers of the tourism sector directly? The answer is that such a distribution would be against the colonial model that defines modern tourism. The intermediaries want to take their cut too, be they wealthy local owners or national corporations. They want to extract profits from their investments in the tourism industry, and that money comes from the tourists. As expanded unemployment benefits expire, the local workers in these places will soon be put in a position to either go to work servicing possibly contagious outsiders, or be unable to afford the necessities of life.

Still, tourism is often considered a good thing for a developing economy. After all, it does inject capital into places that might otherwise remain quite impoverished. Modern, global economics is oft lauded by neoliberal economists as the world having been flattened by technology, be that the relative affordability of air travel and consumer goods or the vast repository of free information on the internet. Capital is able to move about the world more freely than at any time in history, and this is good for everyone! A rising tide lifts all boats, they say, neglecting to mention that most do not own boats. As a tourist, you want to believe this. We are all biassed towards these convenient altruisms; it is easy to love the idea that the thing you enjoy doing is also helping other people, with little or no extra effort on your part. You want to believe that tipping 10% at a roadside shrimp stand will somehow, perhaps in aggregate, pay for that Bahamian kid’s college tuition. “These new shoes I bought also send shoes to a poor child in Africa! I’m helping!” These are stories we like to tell ourselves, but they are oversimplified ones that easily wander well away from the truth.  Interconnectedness alone does not equalize anything, and any claim of altruism in consumerism is merely marketing. While there are great advantages to the interconnectedness of the modern world, it also makes it easier for the colonial model to expand. It makes tourism more accessible for the middle class of developed nations, and although some tourist dollars certainly do trickle down to locals in tourist locales, in the end it merely expands the geographic breadth of the master/servant dynamic, rather than remedying it. Look at the shanty towns outside of Cancún or those camper-van villages in Jackson Hole and you will see that tourism in its current incarnation does not alleviate poverty or empower the people who inhabit toured lands. It is easy for those of us who might live in the middle or upper class of an affluent nation to embrace the global economy when it is built to serve us at the expense of others. But the world isn’t flat; we’re on top of it, and the blood is rolling downhill away from us while we take photos of the scenery.

Understanding that tourism is an entirely voluntary action within the framework of capitalism forces you to look at the consequences of traveling in a different way. Having a socioeconomic status that allows you to afford vacations is a rare privilege in the history of humanity, and with that privilege—with that freedom—there is an obligation to consider others who are less free to choose their own adventures. The most ethical forms of travel are those that maximize the health, well-being, and freedom of the local people. Interrogating the ethics of tourism is answering the question of how you can do that in a system built on a colonial, capitalistic model. The answer to that question right now is the simplest it will ever be: Do not travel. Certainly not very far. Not unless it is somehow absolutely necessary, which leisure travel is quite obviously not. The dilemmas of how long to visit a place, of where to stay, of whether to use AirBnB or a hotel, of eating at a chain or a local restaurant and how much to tip the server—these are all irrelevant in a global pandemic. The only question you have to ask is “could I be unknowingly carrying a deadly illness to this place?” and the answer right now, for nearly everyone, is yes. Vaccines are here, and they are helpful, but vaccination numbers are not rising at the same pace as infections are. Many governments have jumped the gun on loosening restrictions before vaccines have had a chance to create useful proportions of immunity. Latin America, where many Americans go seeking sun and sand, has largely unvaccinated populations and high rates of infection. We should acknowledge these factors and act accordingly. If you treat people, as Immanuel Kant implored, as an end in themselves and not a means to an end, it is incredibly hard to risk their health and safety so you can accomplish your goal of relaxation. 

That isn’t to say the decision is easy. I’ve spent a number of years studying tourism and pondering the ethics of it, and it isn’t because I think people should stay home. In fact, it is the opposite; I study this because I love to travel. The things you get to experience, the quest for novelty, connections across cultures, natural beauty, these wonderful things that drive us to step onto a train, board an airplane or pack up a tent and sleeping bag are valid and real. They are one of the best parts of the human experience. But when we engage in these activities without consideration for how they affect others, we are not creating joy but rather we are stealing it. I am not going to stop flying (with apologies to the marvelous Greta Thunberg), in part because as an American, I don’t have the benefit of available train routes to a myriad of other cultures, as exists in Europe. That does not mean, however, that I don’t consider the fact that any flight I take is inching our world closer to climate death. I try to consider the impact of my travel and minimize or offset its damage. Climate change and utilitarian carbon calculus is a topic for another time, though, fraught with its own moral hazards. Regardless, while I can’t preach abstinence-only when it comes to vacations, the risks now are too great for any major excursions. Treating everyone as an end in themselves in the purest sense isn’t possible, and even Kant understood this. Sometimes the waiter may just be a means to an appetizer—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip generously. Do the best you can for others, within your circumstances. Subjectify the people of the places you visit as much as you can, understanding that you can never fully remove objectification from tourism, and never forget the humanity of the people you encounter. It’s true that if you were to apply these ideas in the future, the considerations of colonial economics, climate change, and epidemiology are a lot to weigh while planning your next trip. Perhaps more practically, we can emulate Michael Pollan’s famous ethos on food: travel some, not too much, mostly on the ground, in a way that benefits locals and minimizes harm. Right now, minimizing harm is harder than it used to be, so stay local, stay safe, wear your mask, and remember that the places you visit do not exist for you…except maybe Disney World.

Christopher Riendeau

Christopher Riendeau holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research focuses primarily on applied ethics in tourism, existentialism, and the life and travels of Simone de Beauvoir. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner and one very cool cat.

• Christopher Columbus
• colonialism
• Hal K Rothman

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Hi there Christopher First of all, thank you for this incredible essay. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in being a guest on a soon-to-be launched podcast. Please contact me at your convenience via the details provided in this email so we might talk further. Blessings on your day. Sincerely Chris

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Colonial Tourism

Eric T. Jennings is a Professor of the History at the University of Toronto (Victoria College). His works include: Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011), and Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Duke University Press, 2006). His books have all been translated into French; Imperial Heights is in its second edition in Vietnamese, as well. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Published: 21 June 2022
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Spanning all continents except for Antarctica, this entry seeks to uncover some of the trends and tropes of colonial tourism. It first considers definitions as well as unique and shared features of colonial travel. It ponders the scale of the phenomenon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before analyzing the passage over to the colony, colonial cruises and colonial hunting expeditions. It then turns to power relations at imperial hill stations and spas. It takes on the question of indigenous tourism, tied in part to the rise of an expanding middle-class in a number of different colonial contexts. The entry then engages with armchair travel through colonial exhibits, as well as the issue of non-European imperial tourism. Finally, it discusses postcolonial breaks and continuities during and after the era of decolonization.

Colonial tourism, broadly defined, relates to a host of issues touching on power relations, mobility, practices, sociability, class, gender, health, consumption, identity, and leisure. It sheds light on the construction of the categories of colonizer and colonized, as well as intermediaries between them. It also prompts questions about the role of the colonized in an imperial enterprise—were they victims, collaborators, active participants, or perhaps all three?

What precisely constitutes colonial tourism? Were so-called exotic exhibits held in London, Chicago, Copenhagen, Paris, and beyond forms of tourism aimed at making armchair travelers take the step to becoming full-fledged globetrotters? Do colonial officials on furlough or anthropologists on a mission fit the bill? Were the Orientalists studied by Edward Said tourists per se, or does this elite coterie not bear the hallmarks of modern mass tourism? Certainly, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’s early (1842–1845) daguerreotypes of Istanbul, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and beyond, reveal a staging and mixing of archeological wonders with a fascination for the so-called exotic, as well as landscape, that at the very least anticipates modern tourism. 1 When he visited the temple of Philae in Egypt in 1844, Girault de Prangey left behind that quintessential touristic imprint, one which subsequently became taboo, a graffiti bearing his name. 2

Eric G. E. Zuelow’s expansive definition of modern tourism as “travel in pursuit of pleasure and an escape from everyday realities” is quite useful in a colonial context, where it encompasses everything from cruise travel to colonial transhumance—the periodic dual quest for altitude and for replicas of Europe in the tropics. 3 In other words, such a wide definition spans at once the occasional traveler on a month’s journey, the seasoned colonial undertaking lateral movements overseas, and an emerging colonized bourgeoisie in search of leisure time.

Both the fields of colonial and tourism studies have been particularly dynamic and rich over the past thirty years, although curiously the intersection of the two has proven less fertile. A number of theoretical points raised in tourism studies are of relevance here. Shelly Baranowksi and Ellen Furlough underscore some of the stigma long associated with “tourists” as opposed to “travelers”—the former being presumably more exploitative and damaging to local settings than the latter. They survey different understandings of tourism, including the notion of liberation and escape through “excursions,” as well as tourism’s relationship with both consumer and visual studies. In particular, they highlight the importance of cultural production around tourism, including advertising, film, posters, postcards, the press, and other media. 4

In most colonial contexts, with the notable exceptions of sites such as the pyramids of Giza, Niagara Falls, Angkor Wat, and Bali, colonial tourism remained relatively modest in scale until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Although one must naturally avoid drawing simplistic lines going from “class to mass” in the realm of tourism history, there can be no doubt that the daunting costs associated with long-range tourism prior to the Suez (opened in 1869) and Panama (opened in 1914) canals rendered it an elite activity until the post–World War II era. 5 Transportation limits were not the only brake holding back colonial tourism. Clichés about the lethal tropics, and visions of warm lands as places suitable for deportation to a penal colony rather than leisure sites, informed much nineteenth-century travel literature. In her best-selling 1897 memoir Travels in West Africa, Mary Kingsley remembered quite sensibly beginning her travel planning with a visit to her doctor. The medic pronounced her destination in West Africa the “deadliest place on earth,” while showing her “maps of the geographical distribution of disease,” and concluding: “I wouldn’t go there, if I were you.” 6 So long as sub-Saharan Africa remained known as the white man’s grave, tourism to it remained limited. This would change around the turn of the century, although Kingsley’s own death to fevers in South Africa in 1900 certainly did not brighten the outlook for others.

Sources for the study of colonial tourism include guidebooks and memoirs, posters, and other forms of colonial propaganda, photographs, prescriptive literature, and the press. To be sure, historians glean quite different findings from guidebooks, newspapers, and pamphlets than they do from records of hotel registers, visitors’ books, diaries, or international debates over big game reserves. Yet each of these quite distinct types of sources benefits from being set into dialogue with the other. Each also speaks to the many actors and wrinkles behind colonial tourism. Indeed, sources can reveal the moving parts of touristic strategies, as well as some of the contradictions and ironies tied to imperial tourism. For example, ethnographic writings informed colonial guidebooks, which did not prevent ethnographers from occasionally heaping scorn at the rudimentary and unnuanced assertions of such popularized texts. 7

A growing current within the field of tourism studies seeks to reject binaries. It also challenges conventions according to which tourism has somehow “ruined” previously “pristine” societies. It further tends to reject the corollary notion that people on the receiving end of touristic flows are somehow straightforward “victims.” And yet, in colonial settings, early “ethno-tourism,” for lack of a better term, did cast an exploitative imperial gaze on the colonized. It rested on civilizational and racial differentiation, and enacted a set of hierarchical relations. 8

Colonial tourism was certainly not unique. It shared many tropes and norms with European and North American vogues, be it mountaineering, the lure of the sea, taking the waters, or hunting. Indeed, colonial relationships could be multilayered. Moreover, quite apart from the “overrepresentation” of Corsicans, Basques, and Bretons in the French colonial services, and Welsh and Scottish ones in both missionary organizations and as formal agents of the British empire, one can of course cast colonial tourism as an intra-European phenomenon as well. As Eugen Weber long ago noted, the diaries of Parisian travelers in remote parts of France drew constant “civilizing” and “bush” parallels with overseas colonial missions, be they in Tunisia or West Africa. 9 Much the same could be said of London’s gaze toward Ireland and Scotland, or Rome’s toward the south of the Italian boot.

Yet in some respects, overseas colonial tourism stood apart. As Colette Zytnicki and others have asserted, tourism in this context can be seen as an instrument of domination, even though, as she underscores, it involved a multitude of actors, including colonial officials, local notables, corporations, travelers, and the colonized, of course. Furthermore, some forms of tourism proved more or less uniquely colonial, including the fascination with the exotic, with deserts and their oases or with big game that had become scarce in most European settings. 10

Transportation and Cruises

The passage over constitutes at once a point of commonality and difference with other forms of tourism. Indeed, the trip, be it across the Mediterranean or around the world, was on average far more of an expedition in colonial cases. The distinction between travelers on official business, colonial administrators, short-term adventure seekers, anthropologists, missionaries, writers, and other characters on board vessels bound for the colonies could sometimes be tenuous—some certainly checked off more than one proverbial box. Consider, for example, the case of Marguerite Duras’s family, drawn to a career and life in Indochina, according to her, by a poster aiming at attracting tourists, rather than settlers, to the region. 11 Yet by the twentieth century at least, advertisers zeroed in on specific tourist categories. These were no ordinary advertisers. Package tour operators and travel companies such as Thomas Cook proved to be key, even near monopoly agents for organizing travel to Australia, for instance. 12

Similarly, the French Compagnie Transatlantique distributed elegant passenger lists to those on board both its cruises and regular transport ships to the colonies. Missionaries, administrators, and wealthy planters rubbed shoulders around the swimming pool, and celebrated the crossing of the tropics (with a good-natured Neptune-themed celebration on deck), long before reaching the colony. Sensing a fine business opportunity, between the world wars the Compagnie also offered tours of French colonial North Africa commencing in New York. Their 1933 flyer promised a mood and setting akin to a “country club” aboard the De Grasse . It held out hope that travelers would form “some social or business friendship that will be cherished for years to come.” With all of this networking and on-board luxury, Morocco nearly became an afterthought. Yet colonial cues are omnipresent in the colorful flyer. The cruise itself is presented as an “invasion of the Barbary Coast.” Casablanca is celebrated as an “age-old startlingly modern city,” a dual emphasis that provides nods to both preservationist and avant-gardist colonial thrusts. Algiers is cast in vaguer terms: “every moment is precious and there is so much to see and to remember.” Among the flyer’s crisp pitches are “Farewell to winter,” “Across the longest gangplank in the world amid Parisian atmosphere,” and finally “days of enchantment, nights of mystery.” 13

Colonial cruises achieved a degree of popularity between the two world wars. In 1937, a French imperial agency noted that the customers now taking colonial cruises would never had been in a position to visit Egypt, Madagascar, Canada, Madagascar, or Mauritius thirty years prior (note the mix of formal French colonies and former areas of indirect French influence). Still, this source recognized, only a very specific social category was able to undertake such a journey. Indeed, a cruise to Indochina, the French South Pacific, or Madagascar lasted between eighty and one hundred days, thereby setting limits to the types of people able to afford the time away from their regular activities (retirees or the independently wealthy). As for financial costs, the Messageries Maritimes and Chargeurs Réunis had decided to cut prices, offering touristic cruises at more or less the cost of basic return tickets. Yet for all of these transformations, their clientele remained limited. In 1936, a Messageries Maritimes cruise to the South Pacific counted only some sixty tourists, and another to Indochina eighty-five in total. 14 Some of the travelers were independently wealthy, others retired administrators, and others still priests. This puts into perspective the document’s claim that these two companies were benefiting from a “trend” of colonial cruises.

Hunting and Safaris

In some ways, international big game hunters defied the boundaries of empires and metropoles. These globetrotters were specifically attracted to lands they considered “virgin,” in which large game had not yet been depleted. The Harrison brothers constitute an eloquent example. Francis Burton Harrison served as US governor to the Philippines from 1913 to 1921; his brother Archibald Cary Harrison was best known as a hunting enthusiast. The two siblings were passionate about this occupation which took them around the world: they shot game in highland Indochina and on the “frozen lakes of Canada,” as well as along Scottish lochs. Harrison’s tribute to his brother after his death used hunting to channel virtues of aristocracy, masculinity, but also, interestingly, conservation: “Generous and courteous to his companions, even tempered and calm in difficulties, modest and utterly indifferent in danger, and at heart, a true conservationist of game.” Danger, of course, constituted a key element that set colonial hunting apart, for the Harrison brothers hunted bears in Canada and tigers in Indochina, as opposed to less threatening grouse in Britain. Moreover, the Harrisons rubbed shoulders with the likes of Reginald George Burton, a British hunter and colonial hero who had penned books with the suitably sensational titles of Man Eaters and The Book of the Tiger . 15

During their time in Indochina, the Archibalds also contributed to conservation, albeit in a roundabout way (see Moranda, this volume). A 1917 letter from Indochina’s governor general Albert Sarraut to his superior in Paris noted the growing number of hunting visitors in the central Lang Bian plateau area. He mentioned the visit of Governor Francis Harrison the year prior and announced his return the following year. He also bemoaned the “barbaric and irrational hecatombs” that “some European hunters” had exacted on local fauna with the sole goal of “accumulating the greatest number of heads, without taking into consideration species or sexes of the animals.” 16 This led Sarraut to establish a game reserve, with an eye to protecting tigers, but also the increasingly rare gaur. Although Sarraut did not mention his American peer by name, the Harrisons too had clearly exacted a heavy toll on nature. Evidence of this can be found in the vast collection of game trophies they donated to the Bronx Zoo and to the American Museum of Natural History.

Archibald Harrison’s narration of his Indochinese travels dwells on some of his French collaborators and on the many species he slew with them, including the two breeds—tigers and panthers—which still earned hunters a bounty at the time. Although they barely earn a mention, it is clear that local indigenous people had helped lift the Harrisons to the highland hunting area on their backs from the train station on colonial “sedan chairs,” and had served as hunting guides and assistants. 17 Other sources suggest that local indigenous groups acted to moderate the hunt. For instance, in 1920, American hunter Henry C. Flower Jr. recounted that his guides in Indochina had adamantly refused to see him kill more than one tiger per expedition, as they were convinced that misfortune would befall them if more than one tiger were felled. Similar beliefs are conveyed by a number of hunters, even in colonial fiction. Pierre Croidys’s 1938   Seigneur Tigre et son Royaume (Lord Tiger and his Kingdom) also relates a conviction that spirits would exact revenge on those who shot tigers. 18 Apart from their moderating influence, local people were not just central to the hunt, they were also massively more numerous than the white shooters who fancied themselves alone with their rifles atop their elephants or behind their hunting blinds.

Colonial hunting sometimes dovetailed with other forms of tourism. For example, in 1912, colonial authorities established a hunting reserve in the southeastern quadrant of the famous ruins of the Angkor Wat temple complex. They ordered hundreds of Cambodians to trap and gather deer, pheasant, peacocks, and elk from far and wide, and had them transported to the new reserve by ship, along lakes and rivers. As a consequence, travelers thereafter could combine visits to the expansive temple complex with an afternoon of hunting (the archives are unfortunately silent as to whether the six elks brought to the area were able to reproduce before becoming trophies). 19 A 1937 Indochinese hunting brochure is riddled with ads for hotels, vehicle rental services, outfitters, rifles, photo equipment, and the like. Its final advertisement reads: “Come hunt in Indochina, and take advantage of your stay to witness the famous ruins of Angkor. Come stay at the new Siemrep (Angkor) hotel CHEZ VERGOZ, which will organize your expeditions in an area that … still offers some of the best game.” 20 The word “still” was somewhat misleading insofar as game had been imported there en masse twenty-five years earlier.

Nature reserves in colonial settings owe their genesis to several currents and institutions, including the path-breaking US national park network (Yellowstone was the first, founded in 1872). Yet the first hunting restrictions, and the early hunting reserves just described, also proved influential in this regard. In the Belgian Congo, for instance, some of the hunting reserves created in the 1920s morphed into full-fledged national parks in 1934. 21 Conservation had become a sine qua non for continuing to lure the hunting tourist. This fits the chronology established by John Mackenzie for the British empire, who sees an initial moderation of the colonial hunt in the nineteenth century, followed by an era of oversight in the early twentieth century, and finally the establishment of reserves and conservation areas between the two world wars. 22

In addition to constituting “a ritualized … display of white dominance” 23 the colonial hunt also operated as a social facilitator, a point of contact with indigenous populations, as well as a source of dialogue between metropole and colony (hunting narratives were popular reads back home). As we have just seen, it also held a key place in a colonial tourism sector that increasingly sought to offer hunting as one of several draws to be combined with the visit of archeological sites, for instance (see Gordon , this volume).

Power Relations

The carrying of hunters atop the backs of indigenous porters was only one example of exploitative practices that clearly set colonial tourism apart. Many a colonial manual contained equally revealing phrases in local languages aimed at colonial tourists in alien settings. Thus a 1931 guide to Madagascar featured a litany of orders in basic Malagasy, intended to allow travelers to get by while maintaining imperial hierarchies. They included: “Give me something to drink”; “Climb up there”; “Leave me alone”; “Don’t talk back”; “I require twelve porters”; “Give me a good horse”; “Lend me some money”; and “Cook some rice.” Following the “orders” section, the guide provided sample questions that proved no less revealing. Among them one finds: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”; “Have you brushed my shoes?”; and “Why have you acted in this manner?” 24 Although one can debate how useful or used such Berlitz phrasebook type of sentences actually were in everyday situations, the samples provided certainly speak to the power dynamic behind colonial tourism encounters (see Stanonis , this volume).

Hill Stations

Nowhere were colonial power relations made more starkly clear than in so-called “hill stations” and colonial spas. Unlike the forms of tourism analyzed earlier, hill stations and spas generally catered to colonists on location, offering them a replica of home, a respite in a cool microclimate. These “belvederes of empire” proliferated in Malaysia, Ceylon, and mainland British India, as well as in Dutch, French, and US colonies in Asia. 25 Hill stations often served as unofficial summer seats of power. With their regional European architecture, their familiar scenery, and cool breezes, they also acted as nostalgic triggers for homesick colonials. In this sense, they constituted a special type of colonial tourism, one implicating settlers and officials on location wishing to escape the tropics. The ritualized transhumance to the hills was part and parcel of the colonial lifestyle from India (Simla) to Ceylon (Nuwara Eliya), and on to Cameroon (Dschang) by way of Indochina (Dalat) and the Dutch East Indies (Bandung). 26

There was unmistakable emulation at work among imperial hill stations. The authorities in French Indochina sent teams to study the hill stations of the Dutch East Indies, the American-controlled Philippines, and the British Raj. Inspired by these examples, they ordered the construction of a web of hill stations across Indochina. Each possessed its grand hotel, cottages, pine forests, and other reminders of home. The lavish spending on these sites elicited criticism from colonizer and colonized alike. For instance, a Franco-Vietnamese reformer named Eugène Dejean de la Batie took aim at Bokor, Cambodia’s hill station. He wrote in 1925: “In Indochina, the current mood promotes daring methods and sumptuous hotels. After all, we must attract American multi-millionaire tourists, right?” De la Batie then quipped that Bokor needed giant ventilation fans more than it did a grand hotel, for the former, rather than the latter, could best combat its real enemy: stubborn fog. 27

Climate tourism in early twentieth century colonial settings dictated the construction of vast public works projects of this type. The question remains whether this kind of internal, lateral, and periodic movement of white populations within the colonies shared much in common with broader tourist trends. A 1926 guidebook to Indochina provides a clue in this regard. It reads: “Tourists and residents! Indochina possesses many attractions: archeological sites, hunting grounds, tourist areas, beaches, hydro-mineral spas … All deserve to be discovered. However, in the interest of your health, you should undertake once a year a mountain cure in one of our hill stations: Bana (Annam), Bokor (Cambodia), Cascade d’Argent (Tonkin), Chapa (Tonkin), Dalat (Annam.).” 28 In this way, hill stations were at once conceived as cogs in a broader tourism sector, and unique agents of healthfulness (see Mathieu , this volume).

The same 1926 guide mentioned water as well as altitude cures. Taking the waters might at first appear no different an activity in the colonies than at Bath, Vittel, or Marienbad in Europe, or Saratoga Springs or Banff in North America. And yet, as with hill stations, spas operated as powerful reminders of home in imperial settings. Acclimatization theorists, who posited the need for Europeans to undertake a series of carefully executed rituals and regimens to survive in the tropics, soon identified spas as colonial facilitators, rendering tropical life possible for whites. Two logics were at work here, one having to do with chemical composition, the other with older telluric theories. Indeed, tropical doctors established equivalencies in mineral content between spas in the colonies and in Europe. Yet at the same time, a logic of place dictated to some colonials that the key to overcoming the ills of the tropics should be found in the wholesome springs of that very land.

In Spanish Mexico, the colonizers sought to strip the Mesoamerican temazcal or steam bath of most of its social and religious significance and to merge it into European spa culture. By the late eighteenth century, Spanish doctors and scientists were taking samples of waters in various corners of Mexico so as to ascertain their precise healing functions. Soon, new hydromineral establishments were created to attract the local bourgeoisie for its ritualized water-taking. The eighteenth-century bathing establishment at Peñón de los Baños fostered the same sort of activities and luxuries that water seekers might have found at Harrogate or Spa in Europe. By the nineteenth century, some Mexican spas began catering to less well-to-do customers, making water cures a national mainstay (see Wood , this volume). In the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) Dutch scientists, who showed more trust in acclimatization than some of their more skeptical European counterparts, advocated water therapies in the mid-nineteenth century. A visiting German doctor recommended combining them with hill station visits. In South Africa, meanwhile, spas contributed to the entire colony’s reputation as a health resort, attracting health seekers, especially victims of tuberculosis, from as far as Britain. By the late nineteenth century, promotional literature made spas part and parcel of South Africa’s touristic appeal (see Pirie , this volume). 29

In French colonies, one can identify a veritable hydromineral-imperial complex. Spa visits were regulated, integrated into colonial furloughs, and promoted as essential reinvigorating, rewhitening experiences. The French empire, like the Roman one long before it, rested on its thermae . 30 In Algeria, spas were interspersed across the colony: Hammam-Berda lay halfway between Bône and Constantine; Hammam-Mekoutine near Guelma, Salah-Bey, and Biskra in the Constantine area; the Queen’s Baths in the suburbs of Oran, Hammam-Melouane, and Aïoun-Sekhakhna near Algiers; and finally Hammam-Rhira roughly 100 kilometers from the capital. This hydromineral density meant that colonials could readily take the waters on location, in addition to the medical pilgrimages which elites undertook annually to resorts such as Vichy, Plombières, and Vals-les-Bains, in mainland France (the competition between local and metropolitan spa constituted a recurring leitmotif in administrative correspondence). 31

Yet for all these efforts to make colonial spas the preserve of Europeans, the archival record attests to the ongoing indigenous uses of these same waters for medical purposes. At Korbous in Tunisia, the colonizers scoffed at local Muslims and Jews for making “incorrect” uses of the waters, but noted with some surprise that they, like French doctors, recommended a twenty-one-day treatment regimen. 32 Similarly, at Hammam-Rhira in Algeria in 1880, one Dr. E. Renard derided the supposedly irrational and unscientific use of waters by local populations. He railed: “I will let you be the judge of such thermal treatments. Establishments in France would yield mediocre therapeutic results, and slim profit margins, if their bathers behaved the way indigenous Africans do!” 33

Ultimately, separation was seen as the solution for distinguishing European from indigenous water practices. In neighboring Algeria, by the second half of the nineteenth century, spas had been segregated. A colonial doctor wrote of Hammam-Rhira in 1879: “The civil establishment … is divided into two parts, one reserved to Arabs in the foreground … In front one sees a small Moorish café, with on either side, rooms where the Arabs can rest after their baths … Further back, four pools are reserved to them. Behind that, and high above, stands the European spa building.” As a net result, in 1883, a certain Dr. Brandt was able to reassure British customers, in English no less, about the strict segregation in place at Hammam-Rirha: “There are distinct and separate baths for visitors at the hotel; for the Jews, an establishment apart from the hotel; and for the Arabs in a building in front and below the hotel. Visitors need fear no annoyance or inconvenience from the latter, though they do flock in numbers.” 34 In other words, notwithstanding the resort’s name, a European visitor and patient could feel at Hammam-Rirha as if they were at Spa, Baden-Baden, or la Bourboule. Here was a form of tourism that elided the colony altogether (see Borsay , this volume).

“Native”   Tourism

One of the hallmarks of hill stations and spas involved the colonial desire to escape the local, be it local people or local climates, and to create a small-scale replica of the motherland in situ. In this context, getting away from the colonized was tantamount to escapism, one of the chief leitmotifs of tourism. Yet, as Dane Kennedy has underscored, British planners were soon faced with the ironic reality that their pinnacles of power had begun to attract Indians. Initially, Indian princes forged their way into places like Simla, which acted as unofficial seats of imperial power during the hot season. Although some British officials considered this a positive development, others viewed it as a racialized “incursion” into a British bubble. Soon, the Indian middle classes followed suit, emulating the aristocracy. The British reaction to this widening appeal was all the more hysterical. In 1902, for instance, Lord Curzon railed against the purchase of a house in Simla by a Bengali zamindar . Yet barring Indians entirely was ultimately deemed impractical and counterproductive. Consequently, by 1904, ninety of Matheran hill station’s dwellings were Indian owned, for roughly eleven that were in the hands of Britons. By 1902, H. H. Risley bemoaned that “there is an increasing tendency on the part of wealthy natives to spend the hot weather in the hills.” Indeed, guidebooks aimed at Indian visitors reveal at once an appropriation of the sites and an embracing of the colonial logic for taking to the hills in the first place. Some championed them as disease-free sites. One depicted Matheran as a place to “forget all the troubles and responsibilities of … every-day life and plunge … headlong into the delightful heaven of the peace of Nature.” 35 One should underscore that much like the colonists, these Indians were tourists: they purchased cottages, secondary homes in the hills, not main residences. By 1915, wealthy Indians had purchased some of the most desirable properties in Simla, the crown jewel of British hill stations, and a putative preserve of Englishness. 36

In French colonies, as well, indigenous elites and even the middle classes were playing a greater and greater role in the tourism sector beginning in the early twentieth century. A number of Algerians, including an interpreter, a midranking official, a mechanic, a carpenter, and a tailor had joined the “Touring club algérien” by 1913. This organization was devoted to promoting tourism in Algeria, be it by bicycle, rail, ship, or automobile. Their motivations remain unclear: some may well have sought to attract tourists to their business, while others were no doubt avid travelers themselves in this era of increased mobility. 37

In French Indochina, middle-class Vietnamese tourism witnessed a meteoric rise between the two world wars. For instance, in Annam (central Vietnam today), the number of “internal” tourists rose from 457 to 3,000 per annum between 1933 and 1937. Several factors explain this shift: greater access to transport, be it rail or automobiles, and the rising strength of a local merchant and business class. These local tourists took stock of their territory, learned about it, and often vowed to defend it. For example, in 1923, Vietnam’s future Prime Minister Tran Trong Kim visited the Hai Ninh region near the border with China. His travel notes double as a political manifesto, in which he urges his compatriots and colonial officials alike to stem Chinese intrusions, halt Chinese migration, and to “Vietnamize” the entire border area. 38 Tourism was fast becoming entangled with patriotism, as it was in other contexts, such as in Latin American or Europe. 39 By 1934, the Vietnamese-language press was publishing articles tellingly titled “In our country, where should we go for summer vacation?” It surveyed beaches and hill stations. It sought to normalize emerging European conceptions of leisure time, with the following assertion that merged concerns over work-life balance with older, telluric, and humoral models of healthfulness: “In order to stay healthy, everyone should have summer vacation, be it for a long time or a short time, in cool regions like mountains or beaches.” 40

Exhibits: Armchair Colonial Adventure

Colonial exhibits were legion, be they a smaller component of a world’s fair, or a full-fledged event of their own. The Indian exhibits at the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886 included displays of art, architecture, economic goods, silks, and anthropological studies. This was one of countless extravaganzas in Britain revolving around the jewel in the crown of the British empire, India. The twenty-four-acre Earl’s Court Exhibition Grounds were rebuilt in 1894 by the impresario Imre Kiralfy in a Mughal Indian style. The Empire of India Exhibition opened on the site in 1895. Highlights included the two-story Empress Theatre, which could seat 6,000 viewers for Kiralfy’s spectacle plays, and the 300-feet-high Ferris wheel, whose forty carriages could each accommodate thirty people. One of the mainstays was “India: A Grand Historical Spectacle,” written and directed by Kiralfy and performed in the Empress Theatre. It presented the history of India, from 1024 to the present day, in dance, mime, and songs. 41

The Dutch, too, organized massive colonial spectacles. The most important was that of 1883. Interestingly, to counter the more popular and voyeuristic dimension which the Dutch organizers ascribed to foreign colonial displays, a series of lectures and conferences were organized prior to the event. They showcased international experts on everything from labor matters in the colonies to tropical diseases. The public was also invited to speakers’ series dealing for instance with the flora and fauna of the Dutch East Indies. Many of the events were held at Amsterdam’s equivalent of the Crystal Palace, the Palace of Industry. The 1883 event was explicitly comparative, examining how the Dutch stacked up against other colonial powers. A heavy emphasis was placed on peoples of the colonies, in an ethnographic section. Statistics were dispensed, and artifacts were displayed. The net result was a visit focused on peoples, races, tools and implements, hunting, agriculture, utensils, and their uses. 42

The question remains, although they certainly promoted travel to the “exotic” colonies, did these many spectacles constitute forms of colonial tourism per se? Already at the 1906 colonial exhibit in Marseille, a colorful poster promised visitors the opportunity to immerse themselves into a colonial setting. They could enjoy “Indochinese theatre” as well as “educational, amusing and recreational” sessions of cinematography offering “views of all of Indochina’s constituent parts.” These forty-five-minute projections included a focus on “customs and mores, religious ceremonies, theatre, celebrations, towns and boulevards, markets, schools, railways, tramways, the navy, crops, river navigation, opium production centers, indigenous soldiers, automobiles, races” and especially, in bold letters “comical and amusing images.” 43 In this sense, experientially the exhibit was certainly promoted as a form of tourism.

Similarly, Ellen Furlough describes the 1931 colonial exhibit outside of Paris as featuring “simulated travel.” Building on nineteenth-century diaporamas, wax museums and early cinema, all mediums used to achieve a new “spectacular reality,” 44 the 1931 exhibit sought to achieve exactitude, as evidenced in its cloning of the main temple of Angkor Wat—a huge replica which towered over Paris’ southeastern skyline. Press reports and other testimonies show that many visitors took the “around the world in a day” promotion message seriously, and deemed the visit an “experiential journey.” One visitor admitted to virtual homesickness: “I couldn’t tell where I was … Tonkin or Africa?” Yet the ubiquitous brochures and kiosks aimed at attracting tourists to the actual colonies themselves constituted one reminder that this was a simulacrum. 45

Visitors’ testimonies were not uniformly positive, nor were all visitors credulously convinced that they had just visited the colonies. Communists and Surrealists set up a counterexhibit that violently critiqued empire. Two less politically engaged visitors, Jean Camp and André Corbier, penned a humorous and gently satirical narration of their visit to the 1931 exhibit. It unrelentingly poked fun at armchair travelers. The need for a guide, the displaying of resources that were being brutally extracted from the colonies at considerable human cost, the absurdity of the exhibit’s layout with Djibouti facing Tahiti, the gaudy advertising of corporate sponsors all earned barbs. Yet the most verve was reserved for fellow visitors. The volume’s illustrations included a sketch of tourists being photographed in front of the giant Angkor temple replica, and another showing some decidedly bourgeois “great colonials: the electro-car conductor, the chair renter and the map salesmen”—all ridiculously outfitted in pith helmets. Nor did the satirical authors miss the exhibit’s objective of achieving authenticity. They related their guide’s scripted speech, which ran as follows: “We consider you, dear visitors, as people of good taste. No drum or belly dances, none of the bazar shop windows that have discredited too many previous colonial exhibits. Here we have rebuilt tropical life in all of its authentic picturesque and in its color.” 46 Clearly, not all consumers were duped.

Japanese Colonial   Tourism

The 1931 colonial exhibit in Paris did stand out in one interesting respect: it featured rival colonial empires, including those of Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United States, and Portugal (Britain declined to participate as the Great Depression was taking too heavy an economic toll). Is this to suggest that colonial tourism essentially concerned only Europeans and North Americans? In point of fact, Europeans and North Americans held no monopoly over colonial tourism.

In 1930s Taiwan under Japanese control, a tourism club facilitated the operations of Japanese package tours. Tour highlights included visits of aborigines. The latter were frequently depicted on postcards that Japanese tourists sent home. They were presented as receptive to Japanese “progress,” cooperative, yet “culturally intact.” This was not just a romanticized vision of so-called primitivism, as was pervasive in so many colonial settings; it was also specifically directed at the local context. Indeed, the implication was that highland aboriginal people were somehow “uncontaminated” by ethnic Han influence, in an era of heightened Japanese-Chinese tensions. As for the Japanese tourists themselves, who purchased and sent these artifacts, vacationing in Japan’s “first colony” appears to have stoked nationalist sentiment among these travelers, developing a sense of their country’s “civilizational” élan, and underscoring its exporting of modernity (see Hall , this volume). 47

Epilogue: Postcolonial Continuities

In February 1933, the Central Council of International Tourism convened in Cairo. Its organizers decided to dedicate an annual prize to the finest tourist poster. King Fuad I of Egypt provided the requisite trophy. 48 Nations and empires the world over scrambled to decide on their submission the year following. As empires waned—the British formally withdrew from Egypt in 1956, France had been driven out of Indochina in 1954, the Dutch from Indonesia in 1949, and the United States from the Philippines in 1946—how would travel to former colonial destinations be couched? Would such posters abandon exotic clichés in favor of newly minted national flags or symbols?

The answer turns out to be far less straightforward than might be expected. By the mid-twentieth century, the magnetic appeal of the beach had definitively supplanted hill stations and watering holes. And, to some extent, a representation of beach is a representation of a beach, be it in Tahiti, Aruba, Cuba, Tunisia, or Egypt. Beyond the sea, it is surprising to what extent colonial tropes have endured and even been recycled. In modern-day Vietnam, a giant Disney-like replica of France now towers over the former modest hill station of Bana, on a site once intended to remind French colonials of home. It draws an emerging Vietnamese middle-class seeking an idealized and miniaturized Europe, much as further afield in Asia, Bollywood maintains a “long-standing love affair with Switzerland.” 49 In Britain, meanwhile, “old India hands” have perpetuated Raj nostalgia by tending to plaques, cemeteries and the like, thereby keeping the empire a “living memory” back home. In the second instance, it is the former colonizer who perpetuates “fantasies of dominance.” 50 These are never far beneath the surface to this day, as can be gleaned from expatriate attitudes in the so-called third world, or from tourist garb and forms of entitlement.

Further Reading

Aiken, S. Robert.   Imperial Belvederes: The Hill Stations of Malaya . Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994 .

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Buettner, Elizabeth. “ Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India. ” History and Memory 18, no. 1 ( 2006 ): 5–42.

Furlough, Ellen. “ Une leçon des choses? Tourism, Empire and the Nation in Interwar France. ” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 ( 2002 ): 441–473.

Goscha, Christopher. “ Widening the Colonial Encounter: Asian Connections Inside Indochina During the Interwar Period. ” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 ( 2008 ): 1189–1228.

Hoffenberg, Peter H.   An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001 .

James, Kevin.   Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture . London: Routledge, 2014 .

Jennings, Eric.   Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas . Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2006 .

Jennings, Eric.   Imperial Heights, Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011 .

Kennedy, Dane.   Magic Mountains: Hill Stations of the British Raj . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996 .

MacKenzie, John.   The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 .

Peyvel, Emmanuelle.   L’Invitation au voyage: Géographie postcoloniale du tourisme domestique au Viet-Nam . Lyon: ENS Editions, 2016 .

Walsh, Casey.   Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing and Infrastructure in Mexico . Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018 .

Zytnicki, Colette.   Algérie, terre de tourisme . Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016 .

Zuelow, Eric G. E.   A History of Modern Tourism . New York: Palgrave, 2015 .

1   Stephen C. Pinson , et al., Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019).

2   Christophe Mauron , ed., Miroirs d’argent: Daguerréotypes de Girault de Prangey (Bulle: Musée Gruérien, 2009), 174.

3   Eric G. E. Zuelow , A History of Modern Tourism (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 9.

4   Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough , “Introduction,” in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America , eds. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–34.

  Baranowski and Furlough, “Introduction,” 7.

6   Mary Kingsley , Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (London: MacMillan, 1897), 2–3.

7   George R. Trumbull IV , An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 38.

8   Marc Boyer , “Comment étudier le tourisme,” Ethnologie française 32 (2002–2003), 393–404.

9   Eugen Weber , Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).

10   Colette Zytnicki , Algérie, terre de tourisme (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016), 9, 57

11   Marguerite Duras , Un barrage contre le Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 23.

  Zuelow, A History of Modern Tourism, 99.

“Mediterranean and Moroccan Cruises” French Line Archives, Le Havre , 1997 004 3954.

Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter ANOM) Agefom 594, d. 572.

15   Archibald Harrison , Indochina, a Sportsman’s Opportunity (Plymouth: Mayflower Press, 1933), 11–14.

ANOM, GGI GGI B/21/136, Chasse au Lang Bian.

  Archibald Harrison , 26–42.

18   Eric Jennings , Imperial Heights, Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 85–86 , 232; Pierre Croidys , Seigneur Tigre et son Royaume (Paris: Plon, 1938), 232.

National Archives of Cambodia, RSC 17841.

20   Bureau officiel du tourisme indochinois, Les grandes chasses en Indochine (Saigon, 1937).

21   Albert Michiels and Norbert Laude , Notre colonie: géographie et notice historique (Brussels: l’Edition universelle, 14th edition, n.d.), 60–61.

22   John MacKenzie , The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

  MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature , 7.

24   M. Frenée , Guide des Colonies françaises: Madagascar (Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1931), 64–68.

25   S. Robert Aiken , Imperial Belvederes: The Hill Stations of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii.

  Aiken, Imperial Belvederes , 3.

27   E. Dejean de la Batie , “Le Bockor dans le brouillard,” L’Echo Annamite (1925): 1.

28   Guides Madrolle , De Saigon a Tourane (Paris: Hachette, 1926).

29   Casey Walsh , Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing and Infrastructure in Mexico (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 11 , 17, 41, 57–63, 81–82; Hans Pols , “Notes from Batavia, the Europeans’ Graveyard: The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 1 (2011): 120, 131 ; Dané van Wyk , “The Social History of Three Western Cape Thermal Mineral Springs Resorts and Their Influence on the Development of the Health and Wellness Tourism Industry in South Africa” (MA thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2013).

30   Eric Jennings , Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

31   Fernand Dubief , Note sur la station thermo-minérale d’Hammam-R’Irha (Algiers: Imprimerie Péchauzet, 1878), 6.

  Jennings, Curing the Colonizers , 164–165.

33   Ernest Renard , Station thermale d’Hamma-Rira (Algiers: Imprimerie de l’association ouvrière, 1880), 11.

34   E. Gozzoli , Station thermo-minérale d’Hammam-R’Hira (Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1879), 15 ; G. H. Brandt , Hammam Rirha, Algiers. A Winter Health Resort and Mineral Water Cure Combined (London: H. K. Lewis, 1883), 38.

35   Dane Kennedy , Magic Mountains: Hill Stations of the British Raj (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 198–212 , quotes on pages 207 and 212.

36   Pamela Kanwar , “The Changing Profile of the Summer Capital of British India: Simla, 1864–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 2 (1984), 227.

  Zytnicki, Algérie, terre de tourisme, 64–65.

38   Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights , 171; Christopher Goscha , “Widening the Colonial Encounter: Asian Connections Inside Indochina During the Interwar Period” Modern Asian Studies , 2008, 19–20.

39 For instance, in Europe between 1870 and 1914, a patriotic and commercial conflict raged between French and German spas. See Nathalie Mangin , “Les relations franco-allemandes et les bains mondains d’Outre-Rhin” Histoire, économie et société 13, no. 4 (1994), 649–675. In Ireland and the United States, a similar logic was articulated around “See Ireland First” and “See America First.” Eric G. E. Zuelow . Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 23 ; Marguerite Shaffer , See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001).

40   “Ve Mua He Nen Di Nghi Mat O Dau?” Khoa Học Tạp Chí , (June 15, 1934): 6–7.

41   Antoinette, Burton , “Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travelers in Fin-de-siècle London,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 127–46 ; Peter H. Hoffenberg , An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

42   Marieke Bloembergen , Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhibitions, 1880–1931 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006).

43 Poster by B. Firno, titled “Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille 1906, section indo-chinoise,” reproduced in Eric Jennings , Illusions d’empires: la propagande coloniale et anticoloniale à l’affiche (Paris: Les Echappés, 2016), 64.

44   Vanessa Schwartz , Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

45   Ellen Furlough , “Une leçon des choses? Tourism, Empire and the Nation in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 445–450.

46   Jean Camp and Andre Corbier , A Lyauteyville: Promenade humoristique et sentimentale à travers l’exposition coloniale (Paris: Editions N. E. A., 1931), 14 , 31, 47, 86, quote on 49.

47   Hui-yu Carline Ts’ai , “Diaries and Everyday Life in Colonial Taiwan,” Japan Review 25 (2013): 156 ; Paul D. Barclay , “Peddling Postcards and Selling Empire: Image-Making in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule,” Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2010): 81–110 , quote on page 85.

ANOM Agefom 594.

49 On the broader question of postcolonial Vietnamese reappropriations of French colonial tourist forms and norms, see Emmanuelle Peyvel , L’Invitation au voyage: Géographie postcoloniale du tourisme domestique au Viet-Nam (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2016), 187–206. On the new Bana resort and on Bollywood and Switzerland, see, respectively, http://vietcetera.com/visiting-ba-na-hills-in-danang-vietnam/ and https://houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/bollywoods-long-standing-love-affair-switzerland/ .

50   Elizabeth Buettner , “Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India,” History and Memory 18, no. 1 (2006), 5–42 ; Beverley Ann Simmons , “Saying the Same Old Things: A Contemporary Travel Discourse and the Popular Magazine Text,” in Tourism and Postcolonialism: Contested Discourses and Representations , eds. C. Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 50.

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Chapter 12. Indigenous Tourism

12.2 Tourism, Colonialism, Indigenous Human Rights and Reconciliation

For centuries, Indigenous peoples managed their lands and resources with their own governments, laws, and traditions, however with the formation of the country of Canada, their way of life was changed forever. Among the many assimilation tools used against Indigenous people, the government forced a system of governance on First Nations so that they could no longer use their system of government. The resultant harms from the explicit and systemic strategies of cultural assimilation afflicted upon Indigenous peoples within Canada continue to be documented (Joseph, 2018) and are increasingly recognized in wider society (see Regan, 2011).

The current state of self-determination of Canada’s Indigenous peoples illuminates a growing momentum of cultural resurgences across the Canadian political landscape. In 2020, there are 25 self-government agreements across Canada involving 43 Indigenous communities, and approximately 50 self-government negotiation tables across the country (CIRNAC, 2020a).

Take a Closer Look: Map of Modern Treaties and Self-Government

Review the current Modern Treaties and Self-Government Agreements map [PDF] , or to find out what Indigenous Traditional Territory you live, work or play on, go to the Native Land interactive map .

There are increasing examples of Indigenous self-governance, achieved in parallel or complementary processes that involved settling land claims. Self-government refers to the ability of Indigenous people to govern themselves within the framework of the Canadian Constitution (Government of British Columbia, 2020). According to the federal body mandated to modernize Government of Canada structures, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) self-government is:

Negotiated agreements put decision-making power into the hands of Indigenous governments who make their own choices about how to deliver programs and services to their communities. This can include making decisions about how to better protect their culture and language, educate their students, manage their own lands and develop new business partnerships that create jobs and other benefits for their citizens. (CIRNAC, 2020)

Different forms of governance and agreements have been negotiated in Canada. Looking to the Canadian north provides noteworthy examples of early ground-breaking modern day treaties.

In 1993 Nunavut negotiated a comprehensive land claim agreement, a modern treaty, with the Canadian Government. The agreement is unique because in this case it represents all the people residing in the territory (CIRNAC, 2020). In the western territory of Yukon, 11 of the 14 First Nations have negotiated a self-government and land claims agreement with the federal government. The journey began in 1973, when a delegation of Yukon First Nations Chiefs presented Together today for our Children Tomorrow: A Statement of Grievances and an Approach to Settlement by the Yukon Indian People (1973) to then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Twenty years later, in 1993, the historic Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA) was signed, and provided the template to negotiate individual land claim agreements with each Yukon First Nation.

Take a Closer Look: Yukon First Nations Self-Government

Learn more about the journey taken by Yukon First Nations and about key milestones in their Mapping the Way website , which also features several informative videos.

Notwithstanding the weight of Canada’s colonial past and its violently negative impacts on Indigenous people, there is some evidence that Canada’s historical trajectory can be challenged and a better future can be imagined. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRP, 2007) was officially adopted by the Canada in May 2016, and the provincial government of British Columbia followed suit in November 2019 (Government of British Columbia, 2019).

Take a Closer Look: UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In 2007, the United Nations passed a declaration to address human rights violations against Indigenous peoples. The document, sometimes known as UNDRIP, contains 46 articles, one of which is “Every indigenous individual has the right to a nationality” (United Nations, 2007, p. 5). For more information, read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [PDF] .

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) confirmed the UNDRIP as its framework for reconciliation. The TRC was created to provide an opportunity for those directly or indirectly affected by the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system to share their stories. The Indian Residential Schools system was set up as a way to manage objectives outlined in the Indian Act (Gray, 2011; Joseph, 2018; Regan, 2011). The commission’s work resulted in 94 actions, known as the ‘Calls to Action’, which aim to ‘redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation’ (NCTR, 2015). You can also watch Senator Murray Sinclair introduce some of the issues involved in Truth and Reconciliation in the following video.

Take a Closer Look: Resources that Support Reconciliation

In recent years, a variety of guides and toolkits have been developed that aim to support reconciliation and heal relationships between settlers, newcomers and Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Below are just a few examples of these emerging resources:

• Indigenous Ally Toolkit [PDF]
• 10 ways to be an ally to Indigenous people
• Back pocket reconciliation action plan
• Kitchen table guide for reconciliation [PDF]
• Whose land is it anyway? A manual for decolonization [PDF]
• How to do a territorial acknowledgment

Colonial settlement through the use of tools such as the Indian Act have left a legacy of land displacement, cultural and economic deprivation, and negative emotional and physical health consequences, including tremendous and violent loss of life that Canada’s Indigenous peoples are still striving to overcome. That being said, Indigenous people are working hard to reclaim their traditions, and for many there is an increasing pride in a revitalized culture. Reconciliation, land claims, and increased self-determination support these transformations. Tourism presents an opportunity that, under the right circumstances, can facilitate Indigenous empowerment movements.

The history of tourism has seen considerable exploitation of Indigenous peoples. Land has been expropriated, economic activity suppressed by outside interests, and cultural expressions (such as arts and crafts) have been appropriated by outside groups. Appropriation refers to the act of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission. Specific to overlapping challenges of reconciling appropriation related to land title, and how we proceed in tourism in the BC and Canadian context, it is essential to be aware that:

Ninety-five percent of British Columbia, including Vancouver, is on unceded traditional First Nations territory. Unceded means that First Nations people never ceded or legally signed away their lands to the Crown or to Canada (Wilson, 2018).

In 2012, the Pacific Asia Travel Association organized a gathering of global Indigenous tourism professionals to establish guiding principles for the development of Indigenous tourism. That gathering created both the World Indigenous Tourism Alliance (WINTA) and the Larrakia Declaration . A global network, the WINTA it is made up of over 170 Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations in 40 countries, such as tourism associations, businesses, service providers, and government groups.

Spotlight On: World Indigenous Tourism Alliance

World Indigenous Tourism Alliance (WINTA) was formed in Australia in 2012 during the same gathering that created the Larrakia Declaration. The WINTA global network, with 6 founding Indigenous tourism associations, is made up of over 170 Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations in 40 countries, such as tourism associations, businesses, service providers, and government groups. For more information, visit World Indigenous Tourism Alliance .

The Larrakia Declaration on the Development of Indigenous Tourism, named after the Larrakia Nation, the Australian Aboriginal host community for the meeting (PATA & WINTA, 2014). Key principles were adopted as resolutions at the gathering and form the Larrakia Declaration, which aims to guide all culturally respectful Indigenous tourism business development (World Indigenous Tourism Alliance, 2012, pp. 1–2):

• Respect for customary law and lore, land and water, traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions, cultural heritage that will underpin all tourism decisions.
• Indigenous culture, the land and waters on which it is based, will be protected and promoted through well managed tourism practices and appropriate interpretation.
• Indigenous peoples will determine the extent, nature and organisational arrangements for their participation in tourism and that governments and multilateral agencies will support the empowerment of Indigenous people.
• Governments have a duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous peoples before undertaking decisions on public policy and programs designed to foster the development of Indigenous tourism.
• The tourism industry will respect Indigenous intellectual property rights, cultures and traditional practices, the need for sustainable and equitable business partnerships and the proper care of the environment and communities that support them.
• Equitable partnerships between the tourism industry and Indigenous people will include the sharing of cultural awareness and skills development which support the well-being of communities and enable enhancement of individual livelihoods.

Using these guiding principles, it becomes clear that Indigenous tourism development can be considered successful only if the rights of Indigenous people are upheld.

Notwithstanding the possibilities that may occur when following the guidelines described above, tourism at the intersection of reconciliation is a new and complex undertaking. Higgins-Desbiolles (2012) explored tourism as a force for peace, and by extension, its ability to achieve reconciliation mandates. Among other things, she noted that tourism’s economic motivations challenge the social attributes related to meeting reconciliation mandates. Grimwood et al.’s (2019) explorations question tourism’s ability to contribute to reconciliation aspirations given the underlying entanglement tourism has with colonization. Any approach that considers tourism as force that can benefit Indigenous peoples must by necessity ask — sometimes uncomfortable — questions and “learn to tell new stories.”

This ability to understand one’s own position and contribution in relation to tourism as force for reconciliation, through decolonization, is as true for tourism researchers and educators, as it is for non-Indigenous tour operators and other sector workers. Decolonization can refer to making space for Indigenous perspectives (Grimwood et al., 2019). In an Indigenous tourism context, it also refers to ensuring we all play a part in supporting the production of tourism experiences that are controlled by, and that directly benefit, the Indigenous peoples whose lands and cultures are featured for the enjoyment of visitors.

The history of tourism at the intersection of Indigenous peoples is embedded in colonial power (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2012; Grimwood et al., 2019). Nonetheless, the allure and promise that tourism holds for positively moving forward is compelling. Moreover, there is an increasing appreciation for the way intercultural exchanges can help strengthen cultures at risk, if managed thoughtfully. Despite the risks due to cultural appropriation, there is also growing evidence — that under certain conditions, foremost Indigenous control and ownership – that tourism can promote community and economic development while helping to preserve and strengthen Indigenous culture (OECD, 2019). With that in mind, let’s have a look at some of the features supporting Indigenous tourism in Canada.

Video Attributions

• “ TRC Mini Documentary – Senator Murray Sinclair on Reconciliation ” by National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. All rights reserved.

Groups specially protected in international or national legislation as having a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory, and their cultural or historical distinctiveness from other populations. Indigenous peoples are recognized in the Canadian Constitution Act as comprising three groups: First Nations, Métis, and Inuit.

The action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission.

A set of principles developed to guide appropriate Indigenous tourism development.

Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC - 2nd Edition Copyright © 2015, 2020, 2021 by Morgan Westcott and Wendy Anderson, Eds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Colonialism and Tourism

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Colonialism denotes the creation of colonies for the “conquest and control of other people’s land and goods” primarily by European imperialist nations in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Loomba 2015 : 20). Colonialism and imperialism are two terms often used synonymously. However, the two can be distinguished by the fact that the latter was the ideological framework and form of governance from which the former was practiced. Colonialism embodied imperial power vis-a-vis “the implanting of settlements on a distant territory” (Said 1993 : 9).

The creation of settlements/communities in colonial territories by colonizers resulted in the deconstruction and reconstruction of existing communities and their identities. The ways in which this conquest and control was operationalized differed by nation. Colonizing nations enacted various forms of genocides, military force, seizures of land, displacement of people, denial of knowledge, practices, and representations upon the colonized...

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Ambros, A.P., and C.N. Buzinde. 2021. Indigenous self-representations in the touristic sphere. Annals of Tourism Research 86: 103099.

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Chambers, D., and C.N. Buzinde. 2015. Tourism and decolonisation: Locating research and self. Annals of Tourism Research 51: 1–16.

Higgins-Desbiolles, F. 2020. Diversity in tourism: A perspective article. Tourism Review 75 (1): 29–32.

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Caterina-Knorr, T., Buzinde, C. (2022). Colonialism and Tourism. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01669-6_31-2

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What Is Colonialism? Definition and Examples

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Colonialism is the practice of one country taking full or partial political control of another country and occupying it with settlers for purposes of profiting from its resources and economy. Since both practices involve the political and economic control of a dominant country over a vulnerable territory, colonialism can be hard to distinguish from imperialism . From ancient times to the beginning of the 20th century, powerful countries openly scrambled to expand their influence through colonialism. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European powers had colonized countries on virtually every continent. While colonialism is no longer so aggressively practiced, there is evidence that it remains a force in today’s world.

Key Takeaways: Colonialism

• Colonialism is the process of a country taking full or partial political control of a dependent country, territory, or people.
• Colonialism occurs when people from one country settle in another country for the purpose of exploiting its people and natural resources.
• Colonial powers typically attempt to impose their own languages and cultures on the indigenous peoples of the countries they colonize.
• Colonialism is similar to imperialism, the process of using force and influence to control another country or people.
• By 1914, a majority of the world’s countries had been colonized by Europeans. 

Colonialism Definition

In essence, colonialism is an act of political and economic domination involving the control of a country and its people by settlers from a foreign power. In most cases, the goal of the colonizing countries is to profit by exploiting the human and economic resources of the countries they colonized. In the process, the colonizers—sometimes forcibly—attempt to impose their religion, language, cultural, and political practices on the indigenous population.

While colonization is typically viewed negatively due to its often-disastrous history and similarity to imperialism, some countries have benefited from having been colonized. For example, leaders of modern Singapore—a British colony from 1826 to 1965—credit the “valuable aspects of colonial heritage” with the independent city-state’s impressive economic development . In many cases, being colonized gave underdeveloped or emerging countries immediate access to the burdening European trade market. As the major European nations’ need for natural resources grew ever greater during the industrial revolution , their colonized countries were able to sell them those materials for substantial profits.

Especially for many of the European, African, and Asian countries affected by British colonialism, the advantages were numerous. Besides lucrative trade contracts, English institutions, such as common law, private property rights, and formal banking and lending practices provided the colonies a positive basis for economic growth that would propel them to future independence.

In many cases, however, the negative effects of colonialism far outweighed the positive.

The governments of the occupying countries often imposed harsh new laws and taxes on the indigenous people. Confiscation and destruction of native lands and culture were common. Due to the combined effects of colonialism and imperialism, scores of indigenous people were enslaved, murdered, or died of disease and starvation. Countless others were driven from their homes and scattered across the globe.

For example, many members of the African diaspora in the United States trace their roots to the so-called “ Scramble for Africa ,” an unprecedented period of imperialism and colonialism from 1880 to 1900 that left most of the African continent colonized by European powers. Today, it is believed that only two African countries, Ethiopia and Liberia, escaped European colonialism .

Imperialism vs. Colonialism

While the two terms are often used interchangeably, colonialism and imperialism have slightly different meanings. While colonialism is the physical act of dominating another country, imperialism is the political ideology that drives that act. In other words, colonialism can be thought of as a tool of imperialism.

Imperialism and colonialism both imply the suppression of one country by another. Similarly, through both colonialism and imperialism, the aggressor countries look to profit economically and create a strategic military advantage in the region. However, unlike colonialism, which always involves the direct establishment of physical settlements in another country, imperialism refers to the direct or indirect political and monetary dominance of another country, either with or without the need for a physical presence.

Countries that undertake colonialism do so mainly to benefit economically from the exploitation of the valuable natural and human resources of the colonized country. In contrast, countries pursue imperialism in hopes of creating sprawling empires by extending their political, economic, and military dominance over entire regions if not entire continents.  

A few examples of countries generally considered to have been affected by colonialism during their histories include America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and Brazil—countries that came to be controlled by a large number of settlers from European powers. Typical examples of imperialism, cases in which foreign control is established without any significant settlement, include the European dominance of most African countries in the late 1800s and the domination of the Philippines and Puerto Rico by the United States.

The practice of colonialism dates to around 1550 BCE when Ancient Greece , Ancient Rome , Ancient Egypt , and Phoenicia began extending their control into adjacent and non-contiguous territories. Using their superior military power, these ancient civilizations established colonies that made use of the skills and resources of the people they conquered to further expand their empires.

The first phase of modern colonialism began in the 15th century during the Age of Exploration . Looking for new trading routes and civilizations beyond Europe, Portuguese explorers conquered the North African territory of Ceuta in 1419, creating an empire that would endure until 1999 as the longest-lived of the modern European colonial empires.

After Portugal further grew its empire by colonizing the populated central Atlantic islands of Madeira and Cape Verde, its arch-rival Spain decided to try its hand at exploration. In 1492, Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus sailed searching for a western sea route to China and India. Instead, he landed in the Bahamas, marking the beginning of Spanish colonialism. Now battling each other for new territories to exploit, Spain and Portugal went on to colonize and control indigenous lands in the Americas, India, Africa, and Asia.

Colonialism flourished during the 17th century with the establishment of the French and Dutch overseas empires, along with the English overseas possessions—including the colonial United States —which would later become the sprawling British Empire. Spanning the globe to cover nearly 25% of the Earth’s surface at the peak of its power in the early 1900s, the British Empire was justifiably known as “the empire on which the sun never sets.”

The end of the American Revolution in 1783 marked the beginning of the first era of decolonization during which most of the European colonies in the Americas gained their independence. Spain and Portugal were permanently weakened by the loss of their New World colonies. Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany made the Old World countries of South Africa, India, and Southeast Asia the targets of their colonial efforts.

Between the opening of the Suez Canal and the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1870s and the start of World War I in 1914, European colonialism became known as “New Imperialism.” In the name of what was termed “empire for empire’s sake,” the Western European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan competed in acquiring vast areas of overseas territory. In many cases, this new hyper-aggressive brand of imperialism resulted in the colonization of countries in which the subjugated majority indigenous populations were denied basic human rights through the enforcement of doctrines of racial superiority such as the White minority-ruled system of apartheid in British-controlled South Africa .

A final period of decolonization began after World War I, when the League of Nations divided the German colonial empire among the victorious allied powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan, and the United States. Influenced by the famous 1918 Fourteen Points speech by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson , the League mandated that the former German possessions be made independent as soon as possible. During this period, the Russian and Austrian colonial empires also collapsed.

Decolonization sped ahead after the end of World War II in 1945. The defeat of Japan spelled the end of the Japanese colonial empire in the Western Pacific and East Asian countries. It also showed still subjugated indigenous people around the world that colonial powers were not invincible. As a result, all remaining colonial empires were greatly weakened.  

During the Cold War , global independence movements such as the United Nations ’ 1961 Non-Aligned Movement led to successful wars for independence from colonial rule in Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, and Kenya. Pressured by the United States and the then Soviet Union, the European powers accepted the inevitability of decolonization.   

Types of Colonialism

Colonialism is generally classified by one of five overlapping types according to the practice’s particular goals and consequences on the subjugated territory and its indigenous peoples. These are settler colonialism; exploitation colonialism; plantation colonialism; surrogate colonialism; and internal colonialism.

The most common form of colonial conquest, settler colonialism describes the migration of large groups of people from one country to another country to build permanent, self-supporting settlements. Remaining legal subjects of their native country, the colonists harvested natural resources and attempted to either drive the indigenous peoples away or force them to assimilate peacefully into colonial life. Typically supported by wealthy imperialistic governments, settlements created by settler colonialism tended to last indefinitely, except in rare cases of total depopulation caused by famine or disease.

The mass migration of Dutch, German, and French settlers— the Afrikaners —to South Africa and the British colonialism of America are classic examples of settler colonialism.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established an outpost in South Africa near the Cape of Good Hope. These early Dutch settlers were soon joined by French Protestants, German mercenaries, and other Europeans. Despite having been associated with the oppressive atrocities of White apartheid rule, millions of Afrikaners remain a vital presence in a multiethnic South Africa after four centuries.

The systematic European colonization of the Americas began in 1492, when Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Far East inadvertently landed in the Bahamas, declaring he had discovered the “New World.” During the subsequent Spanish explorations, repeated efforts were made to either exterminate or enslave the indigenous population. The first permanent British colony in what is now the United States, Jamestown , Virginia, was established in 1607. By the 1680s, the promise of religious freedom and cheap farmland had brought scores of British, German, and Swiss colonists to New England.

The early European settlers shunned the indigenous people, viewing them as threatening savages incapable of being assimilated into colonial society. As more European colonial powers arrived, avoidance turned to outright subjugation and enslavement of the indigenous population. The Native Americans were also vulnerable to new diseases, like smallpox, brought by the Europeans. By some estimates, as much as 90% of the Native American population was killed by disease during the early colonial period.

Exploitation

Exploitation colonialism describes the use of force to control another country for purposes of exploiting its population as labor and its natural resources as raw material. In undertaking exploitation colonialism, the colonial power sought only to increase its wealth by using the indigenous people as low-cost labor. In contrast to settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism required fewer colonists to emigrate, since the indigenous people could be allowed to remain in place—especially if they were to be enslaved as laborers in service to the motherland.

Historically, countries settled through settler colonialism, such as the United States, experienced far better post-colonial outcomes than those that experienced exploitation colonialism, such as the Congo.

Potentially one of the richest countries in the world, years of exploitation colonialism have turned the Congo into one of the poorest and least stable. In the 1870s, Belgium’s infamous King Leopold II ordered the colonization of the Congo. The effects were and continue to be devastating. While Belgium, and Leopold personally, realized a vast fortune from exploiting the country’s ivory and rubber, millions of the Congo's indigenous people starved to death, died of disease or were executed for failing to meet work quotas. Despite gaining its independence from Belgium in 1960, the Congo remains largely impoverished and consumed by bloody internal ethnic wars.  

Plantation colonialism was an early method of colonization in which settlers undertake the mass production of a single crop, such as cotton, tobacco, coffee, or sugar. In many cases, an underlying purpose of the plantation colonies was to impose Western culture and religion on nearby indigenous peoples, as in the early East Coast American colonies like the lost colony of Roanoke . Established in 1620, the Plymouth Colony plantation in what is today Massachusetts served as a sanctuary for English religious dissenters known as the Puritans . Later North American plantation colonies, such as the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Dutch Connecticut Colony , were more openly entrepreneurial, as their European backers demanded better returns on their investments.

An example of a successful plantation colony, Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British colony in North America, was shipping over 20 thousand tons of tobacco per year back to England by the end of the 17th century. The South Carolina and Georgia colonies enjoyed similar financial success from the production of cotton.

In surrogate colonialism, a foreign power encourages and supports, either openly or covertly, the settlement of a non-native group on territory occupied by an indigenous population. Support for surrogate colonialism projects might come in the form of any combination of diplomacy, financial aid, humanitarian materials, or arms.

Many anthropologists consider the Zionist Jewish settlement inside the Islamic Middle Eastern state of Palestine to be an example of surrogate colonialism because it was established with the urging and assistance of the ruling British Empire. The colonization was a key factor in negotiations that resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which facilitated and legitimized the still-controversial Zionist settlement in Palestine. 

Internal colonialism describes the oppression or exploitation of one racial or ethnic group by another within the same country. In contrast to traditional types of colonialism, the source of the exploitation in internal colonialism comes from within the county rather than from a foreign power.

The term internal colonialism is often used to explain the discriminatory treatment of Mexicans in the United States after the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. As a result of the war, many Mexicans who had been living in what is now the southwestern United States became subjects of the U.S. government, but without the rights and freedoms associated with U.S. citizenship. Viewing these people as having been effectively “colonized” by the United States, many scholars and historians use the term internal colonialism to describe the ongoing unequal economic and social treatment of Chicanx peoples in the United States through a de-facto system of subordination.

Does Colonialism Exist Today?

Though the traditional practice of colonialism has ended, over 2 million people in 17 “ non-self-governing territories ,” scattered around the globe continue to live under virtual colonial rule, according to the United Nations . Rather than being self-governed, the indigenous populations of these 17 areas remain under the protection and authority of former colonial powers, such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.

For example, the Turks and Caicos Islands is a British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic Ocean midway between the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. In 2009, the British government suspended the Islands’ 1976 constitution in response to reports of widespread corruption in the territory. Parliament imposed direct rule over the democratically elected local governments and removed the constitutional right to trial by jury. The territorial government was disbanded and its elected premier was replaced by a British-appointed governor. 

While British authorities defended the action as essential to restoring honest government in the territory, the deposed former premier called it a coup d’etat that he said put Britain “on the wrong side of history.”

The years following World War II saw the rise of “neocolonialism,” a term describing the post-colonialism practice of using globalization , economics, and the promise of financial aid to gain political influence in less-developed countries instead of the traditional methods of colonialism. Also referred to as “nation building,” neocolonialism resulted in colonial-like exploitation in regions like Latin America, where direct foreign colonial rule had ended. For example, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was criticized for practicing neocolonialism in the 1986 Iran-Contra affair involving the illegal sale of U.S. arms to Iran in order to secretly fund the Contras, a group of rebels fighting to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that the true eradication of colonialism remains an “unfinished process,” that has been with the global community for too long.

Sources and Reference

• Veracini, Lorenzo. “Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 978-0-230-28490-6.
• Hoffman, Philip T. “Why Did Europe Conquer the World?” Princeton University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4008-6584-0.
• Tignor, Roger. “Preface to Colonialism: a theoretical overview.” Markus Weiner Publishers, 2005, ISBN 978-1-55876-340-1.
• Rodney, Walter. “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” East African Publishers, 1972, ISBN 978-9966-25-113-8.
• Vasagar, Jeevan. “Can colonialism have benefits? Look at Singapore.” The Guardian , January 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/colonialism-work-singapore-postcolonial-british-empire.
• Libecap, Gary D. “The Bright Side of British Colonialism.” Hoover Institution , January 19, 2012, https://www.hoover.org/research/bright-side-british-colonialism.
• Atran, Scott. “The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine 1917–1939.” American Ethnologist , 1989, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5090131_the_surrogate_colonization_of_Palestine_1917-1939.
• Fincher, Christina. “Britain suspends Turks and Caicos government.” Reuters, August 14, 2009, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-turkscaicos/britain-suspends-turks-and-caicos-government-idUSTRE57D3TE20090814.
• “International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism.” The United Nations , https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/history/international-decades 
• American Settler Colonialism 101
• What Is Imperialism? Definition and Historical Perspective
• The Berlin Conference to Divide Africa
• Comparative Colonization in Asia
• Which Asian Nations Were Never Colonized by Europe?
• Countries in Africa Considered Never Colonized
• Belgium Colonialism
• A Brief History of Cameroon
• The European Overseas Empires
• The Dutch Empire: Three Centuries on Five Continents
• What Is Balkanization?
• The Portuguese Empire
• What Motivated Japanese Aggression in World War II?
• A Chronology of Southern African Independence
• What Is a Sphere of Influence?
• What Is Interventionism? Definition and Examples

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Tourism: Mutual Benefit, or Modern Colonialism?

picture: Linh Nguyen, Flickr

Travel & Tourism is the world’s biggest industry, contributing almost one-tenth of world GDP, and employing more than 266 million people. Originating in 17 th century Britain, it involves travel for business and medical purposes, but its most important form is leisure or recreational tourism. Despite its important role in economic growth and employment,  the environmental, cultural and social effects of tourism are still controversial. This begs the question of whether contemporary tourism can be interpreted as a form of modern-day colonialism? As Nils Finn Munch-Petersen explained on his SASNET /UPF lecture, it is rather tourism can be conceived of as ”the appropration of local land, labour and natural  resources for tourism purposes by local elites”. Thus, exploitation does not (only) happen in the West-East direction, but by the global higher class, inside and outside country borders.

”I was asked to talk about how the West was using its power to recolonize developing countries” – Munch-Petersen said as he started his lecture. But – he pointed out – tourism is no more a typical Western-only activity: today 40% of travelers are Chinese. They are the foremost in the case of internal as well as overseas tourism. The fact that the negative sides of tourism are also enabled by local elites goes against the colonialism paradigm as well. These include corruption, prostitution and human trafficking in the form of sex tourism, and elitist racism in the form of ethnic tourism.

One of the most significant cases is that of the Jarawas, one the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands in India. In 2001, a High Court judgment prohibited their relocation to a new reservation, as well as limiting the inflow of tourists. Today tourists can go to the forest only twice a day in a convoy, but despite its illegality, guides are still taking tourists to view Jarawas, and racist souvenirs are still sold in the shops.

As Munch-Petersen pointed out, numerous small countries of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are strongly dependent on tourism. The world’s first ”tourism country” is the Maldives: in 2013 the contribution of the sector to GDP was 94.1% (2.3 billion USD), and it employed almost 122 000 people, 86.7% of the working population .

The demand for the illusion of the ”paradise island” creates an alarming, yet invisible reality for the inhabitants. Next to the fully built-in tourist islands there are garbage islands, and tourism constantly destroys nature and oceanic life: there is no protected area on the Maldives. And it is not only the Maldives: as Munch-Petersen explained, ecotourism does not exist: the real sustainability-minded should not be a tourist, since travel always has an effect on the environment.

According to Munch-Petersen tourism can also injure local culture and customs. For instance, imported souvenirs are sold as originals for tourists – African masks are usually made in Indonesia. Another effect is that the demand for a liberal, and therefore ”West-friendly” environment, makes difficult the maintenance of strict religious customs, for example couples’ ”unruly behavior” of holding each other’s hand in Dubai. If we look at the Maldives, as Munch-Petersen explained, tourism is hardly ”promoting peace”: while tourists have a lot of fun on their islands, fundamental Islam is taking over the inhabitant islands, whose population has quadrupled in the last 30 years.

Recreational tourism was developed in the 17 th century by British tourists, first inside, then also outside the country. The upper class, seeking cultural experiences, travelled to the Italian kingdoms, Greece and Egypt. Mass tourism, as we know it today, was also invented by the West, when free time become available for the masses. As Munch-Petersen told us after the lecture, forms of tourism are highly dependent on income level and social class. Most people want to escape from day-to-day happenings, monotonous work and boredom.

Nowadays tourism is a theatre, and the experiences offered to the public are – in most cases – illusions – says Munch-Petersen. Although, people often travel for the ”sun, sand and sea” – tourists also seek moments others did not live through. „It is important to have a story to tell when they go back home, thus they combine the beach holiday with a bit of culture, and a bit of nature, but these are just add-ons”. In the case of group tourism, everything is prearranged by ”tourism architects” to create the illusion: the safari pants have to get dirty, but tourists cannot be subjected to any real danger they would experience in more ”real” circumstances.

Tourism has serious environmental, social and cultural effects in the destination countries, but it also gives work to millions of people, contributes to the world’s GDP more than any other global sector and allows more than one billion people every year to spend their free time pleasurably. Beyond the definition as modern colonialism, tourism enables the exploitation of the underprivileged in the form of taking over local land, and use as tourist spectacle by local elites. Can it work better, or shall we really stay at home?

ANDREA CZERVAN

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Tourism Review

Accueil Numéros 16 Coloniality and tourism: the fabr...

Coloniality and tourism: the fabric of identities and alterities in India

Country crossed by the colonial matrix, India constitutes a relevant example for thinking about tourist situations and showing how institutional (Indian government) and non-institutional actors (companies, domestic tourists, members of the diaspora) mobilize tourist imaginaries for support or redefine collective identities and alterities - even sometimes reinforce them. This contribution seeks, on the one hand, to question the processes by which tourism in India has become a political instrument, facilitating the rewriting the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization while reifying the West, and on the other hand, to show, from intermediate situations – the Indian diaspora and Indian domestic tourism - how hybridizations are forged in which post- and decolonial paradigms act on identities.

Entrées d’index

Keywords :, texte intégral, introduction: decolonization through domestic tourism.

1 Increasingly massive tourist movements have continued to spread around the world. Formerly reserved for a few elites, these international mobilities today concern populations that have historically been far from the globalization of tourism. As Keen and Tucker suggest, “ the world of tourism is changing as increasing numbers of people from ’non-western’ countries (often former colonized sites) become tourists […] Just as postcolonial theory has been useful in pluralizing modernity, this is clearly raises the need to pluralize the tourist gaze, to reconsider tourists expectations, perceptions and motivations, indeed what is to be a tourist ” (Keen and Tucker, 2012, p. 101). It can also be added that, within developing countries, despite its undoubted cultural and economic importance, domestic tourism has been the subject of a tradition of scientific neglect compared to international tourism (Scheyvens, 2007). For Singh, domestic tourism constitutes in the field of research " the largest, and most unaddressed, proportion of the tourism iceberg " (Singh, 2009, p. 3). Nevertheless, this would be forgetting the numerous works of Nelson Graburn (1983, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2009) and in particular the pioneering role of the journal Annals of Tourism Research (Anthropology of Tourism, 1983), which paved the way for many fruitful questions for studies on domestic tourism.

2 In the case of the Indian Union, according to the latest report from the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourism and leisure sector generated $209 billion, equivalent to 9.6% of GDP, propelling the country to 7th place in absolute value. In addition, this sector created 40.3 million jobs in 2016, which ranks the Indian Union 2nd in the world for the number of jobs created. This sector of activity represents 9.3% of total employment in the country. It also experienced the fastest growth among the G20 countries, with a rate of 8.5% in 2016. Thus, the tourist conquest of the planet is gradually ending - helping to make the Earth and the World coincide (Knafou, 2011) - and each year new categories of populations in so-called “developing” countries gain access to leisure and tourism. This is all the more significant in India where domestic tourism is the main driver of growth in the sector: the foreign currency spent by foreign travelers in 2016 represented only 12% of tourism revenue.

• 1 Following the work of Peyvel, rather than internal tourism, I prefer to speak of domestic tourism b (...)

3 Data from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) show that the country received only 9 million international arrivals in 2016 (10.2 million for 2017, according to the report of the Ministry of Tourism), which places it 40th among tourist destinations in the world. At the same time, the Indian Union recorded 1.6 billion domestic tourist trips, with Tamil Nadu state at the top of the ranking. These domestic practices 1 , without calling into question one of the major privileges of the elites, multiple residences, nevertheless highlight the emancipatory virtues of easier access to tourist practices for a greater number. The price, like the multiplication of tourist circuits targeting this Indian clientele, now facilitates the flow of Indian tourists from the middle classes. From this perspective, tourism can no longer be considered either as an exclusively Western practice, or as a practice reserved for the wealthy. More and more Indians are thus more and more mobile and this geographic mobility makes it possible, even partially, to confirm what Stock (2007) calls the "recreational turn", that is to say a generalization and a diversification of practices, places and times of recreation in contemporary societies.

• 2 "One of the current challenges of tourism research could then consist in renewing the framework of (...)

4 Faced with this, and extending Marie Dit Chirot’s (2017) proposal to "rematerialize tourism studies" 2 , it is appropriate, taking India as a case study, to think about the effects of the remaking of capitalism, of which world tourism represents a major element. This calls into question the categories "third world countries", "tropical", "emerging", but also "of the South" and "developing" which seem for many to be locked in a colonial paradigm. According to Collignon, “ we can speak of a colonial paradigm because it is indeed a global form of thought, which goes far beyond the political order linked to the historical period of colonialism. Its foundation is this ordering of the world built in Europe on a binary opposition between "them", the Others, and "us", the Europeans " (Collignon, 2007).

• 3 Even though the discourse of the orientalists underlined a deep rooting of India in the tradition a (...)

5 As Spivak says, “ the clearest example of this epistemic violence is the vast project, heterogeneous and orchestrated from a distance, of the constitution of the colonial subject as Other. This project also constitutes in the asymmetrical occultation of the trace of this Other in his precarious subjectivity ” (Spivak, 2009, p. 37). For Maldonado-Torres, the colonial project is a model of power consubstantial with the idea of ​​modernity and rebirth. According to this author, coloniality is at the heart of modern experience, more than that, “ beneath the ’I think’ we can read ’others do not think’, and behind the ’I am’ it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that ’others are not’ or do not have being. In this way we are led to uncover the complexity of the Cartesian formulation. From ’I think, therefore I am’ we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable) ” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 252). Everything is done as if Europe and the Western world had thought of a system for creating distances and proximities from spatiotemporal devices, in particular by locating non-Western societies on an imaginary time scale indicating their respective distance from the present Euro-American-Atlantic (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 214). In addition, these categories which have often been constructed and issued by non-scientific but political and economic actors (located in former colonial metropolises), oblige researchers to make contortions, to obscure their research object, and to put quotation marks, plurals and "dits" ("from the South", "developing", etc. 3 ). This western-centrism is problematic because our concepts and methodologies are contaminated by a “geopolitics of knowledge” or “body politics of knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 213): our glasses do not allow us to see the specificities of such contexts, but rather to point out what appear to be gaps, sometimes rendering us incapable of grasping, and therefore of understanding, contexts which function at least in part differently from those of the West. As Coronil notes, “ Occidentalism is inseparably tied to the constitution of international asymmetries underwritten by global capitalism ” (Coronil, 1996, pp. 56-57).

6 In this article I will mobilize the concept of coloniality as defined by Maldonado-Torres in order to make visible those who are invisible, in this case the many Indian tourists visiting their country, and to question the mechanisms which produce this invisibility. For Maldonado-Torres, coloniality survives colonialism, “ coloniality (…) refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. [Coloniality] is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday ” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). It must be said, as Peyvel notes, that " admitting that the former native can be a tourist in his own country is a transcendence of colonial thought, because this amounts to recognizing that he is subject and actor of his mobility, and not only the object of exotic curiosities ” (2017, p. 302).

7 In a way, this amounts to decolonizing mobile populations, to challenging the epistemic hegemony of the West, which has emerged as the privileged place of enunciation and production of knowledge. The Western world has been described as an absolute here. It is therefore a question of challenging this solipsism in order to relativize its centrality as well as the hegemonic claim of modern abstract universalism. Authors such as Chambers and Buzinde (2015) have made strong criticisms of current knowledge in tourism research. For these authors, the latter remain essentially colonial and require an epistemological decolonization which would decentralize Western perspectives. But what do these acts of decentralization imply? What should they look like? In tourism studies, postcolonial theory has often been considered a relevant approach for understanding how tourism developed in ‘the South’ and for demonstrating how Western epistemologies and ontologies dominated the understanding of colonial societies and the effects of this domination, this positioning allows to think about the asymmetries of power and in extenso the relations of domination. Many studies on tourism have adopted such a perspective (Echtner & Prasad, 2003; D’Hauteserre, 2011; Hall and Tucker, 2004; Jacobs, 2010; Chambers and Buzinde, 2015; Peyvel, 2016). This research is itself influenced by postcolonial theorists, and in particular by the concept of “third space” developed by Bhabha (2007) which makes it possible to situate the production of culture in spaces of in-between, of hybridity and ambiguity, allowing one to escape binary and dual visions. For Bhabha, " the process of cultural hybridity gives birth to something different, something new, which one cannot recognize, a new field for negotiating meaning and representation " (2006, pp. 99-100) .

• 4 In 2006, the name officially returned to the pre-colonial denomination, Puducherry. Both internatio (...)

8 As a nation caught up in the colonial matrix, India constitutes a relevant example to rethink tourist situations. This contribution is based on ongoing research carried out within the framework of a CNRS delegation to the French Institute of Pondicherry 4 which focuses on the effects tourist and recreational mobility practiced by Indians on the processes of urbanization and metropolitanization in South India (particularly in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry). The research is mainly based on qualitative methodology and more specifically on "comprehensive" interviews (in the sense of Kaufmann, 2016) and life stories. This article is based more particularly on initial surveys conducted from December 20 to January 16, 2019, corresponding to the Indian holiday season and the peak of attendance of Puducherry by Indian tourists. During this time interval, I conducted 24 interviews in English with members of the English-speaking middle class (11 were from Bangaluru, 6 from Pune, 3 from Chennai, 2 from Mumbai and 2 others from Kolkatta), and in addition interviews with government representatives (Department of Tourism), heritage protection associations (INTACH, POndyCan) and private tourism stakeholders.

9 More specifically, my goal is to show how institutional actors (Indian government in particular) and others (domestic tourists, members of the diaspora) mobilize tourist imaginations to support or redefine collective identities - even sometimes strengthen them. It will also be a question of understanding how these various actors appropriate these representations to understand “ to what extent the tourist imagination no longer appears only as a way of "seeing" the world but also a way of "making" the world ” (Boukhris, 2012). This redefinition led certain operators to reclaim colonial thought grids producing complex identity hybridizations, tourism becoming “ an arena in which relations of power and domination operate at different scales of space and time ” (Marie Dit Chirot, 2018, p. 12).

10 My remarks are divided into two parts. The first questions the processes by which tourism in India has become a political instrument, making it possible to rewrite the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization while reifying the West. Several authors have pointed out that during the postcolonial period, domestic tourism in the former colonies served to support accounts of political identity in the postcolonial state which served its own ideological objectives, often emphasizing stories of resistance to the European colonial powers (Bandyopadhyay & Morais, 2005; Patil, 2011b).

11 In postcolonial heritage and tourism studies, it has been assumed that there is a fundamental divide between tourists from the former colonial powers and those from the former colonies. For example, Graham et al. assert that “ in postcolonial states, the principal dissonance is between new national identities based upon revised and unifying heritage values, and tourism economies, which perpetuate colonial heritage in order to sell them to visitors from former metropolitan countries who recognized their own heritage in them ” (Graham et al., 2000, p. 94). Nevertheless, starting from in-between situations – the Indian diaspora and Indian domestic tourism - we aim to show how hybridizations are forged in which post- and decolonial paradigms act on identities. In this second part we will analyze the tourism practices and aspirations of the Indian middle classes. This is how we put the diaspora and domestic tourism on the same level, because in both cases these middle classes represent an increasingly large group of consumers who increasingly integrate and mix more westernized lifestyles with aspects of Indian culture. We could also add, concerning the diaspora, “ because their tourist traits (for example, tendency to travel to places that foreign tourists do not go, often in order to visit friends and family and attend important social and cultural events) are more closely related to those of domestic tourists than foreign tourists ” (Scheyvens, 2007, p. 309).

I. Orientalism and Westernism: colonial heritage and Hindu nationalism

12 The origin of the institutionalization of tourism in independent India dates back to 1949, the year of the creation of a Tourist Traffic Branch under the supervision of the Ministry of Transport, and “ the first Indian tourist representation overseas is founded in New York, in 1952 ” (Bautès, 2004, p. 423). It was not until 1958 that the government created a separate Ministry of Tourism, which until then constituted a simple Department attached to the Ministry of Aviation and was mainly devoted to the promotion of elite domestic tourism. Although tourism was at that time integrated into the various five-year plans, it was only during the Seventh Plan, between 1980 and 1985 that the development of a new tourism policy led to greater decentralization, each State taking the responsibility to promote and develop its own tourism sector (Bhatia, 1978). Faced with the country’s great linguistic, religious and cultural heterogeneity, successive governments have tried to create a feeling of national belonging through tourism, by erasing the stigma of colonization. As Boukhris and Chapuis recall, “ thinking about tourism also means thinking about the question of national formation (its characteristics, its historical and collective memories, its future) and of the power of the State (from central government to local administrations) ” (2016) Let us analyze the rhetoric and tourist images used by the government and the Indian media to understand to what extent the latter have appropriated Western stereotypes from the East to divert them and maintain a particular form of postcolonial nationalism.

A. Occidentalism and Orientalism

• 5 All these specialists were and are specifically attached to the study of Sanskrit and Vedic texts e (...)

13 India often appears to westerners as the country in the Orient with the greatest extremes of both horror and beauty (Sharma, 2002). These two contradictory images lasted until the Age of Enlightenment, during which the emphasis was placed on the glory of India, thus denying the passage of time, fixing the country in immutability. All this authorized the development of an unsurpassable eastern otherness which mirrored the construction of a European identity and justified its colonial project (Saïd, 1978). It was only in the 19th century, with the discovery of epic and philosophical texts of Indian civilization, that a craze made up of specialists (Indianists, Orientalists and philologists 5 ), breathed new life into literature and the arts. These kaleidoscopic images have founded an archetypal but ambivalent image of India, while reactivating the paradox of a fascinated and distrustful West faced by an elusive India resulting from the entanglement of reality and the imaginary (Weinberger-Thomas 1988). Western conceptions of India mostly tended to accentuate the mysterious, feminine, irrational and religious dimensions of Indian culture as opposed to a civilized, masculine Western culture (not to say virile, because the first colonial texts presented the Indians as effeminate), rational and materially advanced. Even today, for many Westerners, India still seems to be built like a land steeped in ancient wisdom, the mystical / spiritual counterpart to Western rationalism, its inverted image, reinforcing the cliché of Indian thought: neither rational nor scientific, arising from imagination rather than reason (Louiset, 2008).

14 Western travelers therefore tend to perceive India as a spiritual refuge (Assayag, 1999), which gained momentum with the Beatnik generation and the hippie phenomenon: travelers see their journey in India as a break (Lagadec, 2003). In short, “ the image of India in the minds of nostalgic Westerners in the 1960s, spiritual seekers, gurus worshipers, nonviolent hashishins and gullible psychedelics. For them, all Indians are vegetarians and peaceful. India, a stopover on the path to Kathmandu, is the country of the poppy and the Kama Sutra. Beatles and Gandhi, same combat ” (Landy, 1993, p. 93).

• 6 “Located its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superi (...)

15 These exaggerated contrasts were reinforced, manipulated and disseminated by the Indians themselves, according to a process sometimes tinged with auto-orientalism or "self-orientalism" (Echtner and Prasad, 2003). It must be said that tourism is sometimes tautological, since tourists - by their displacement - do, in short, only confirm what speeches and various media sold or talked up for them. The promotion of tourism can be seen as a form of imperialism through which the ghostly traces of colonialism continue to be visible. For example, almost all tours offered in India include what is commonly known as the "Golden Triangle", the peaks of which are Delhi, Agra and Jaipur (Landy, 1993, p. 96). The focus is on the past, religion and an ancient and mystical culture. These constructions constitute a form of partial and simplistic reification perpetuating the orientalist equation of India for clients who wish to experience cultures that they consider timeless and immutable. But, this dichotomy was also reinforced by the Indian nationalists themselves who “ situated their own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and therefore unrelated to domination and sovereign ” 6 (Chatterjee, 1989, p. 632).

16 The demolition of Hampi Bazaar (reported in detail in the local press) is a good example of this rhetoric where the religious elites, and more particularly the ethno-nationalist discourse maintained by certain priests, gave shape to a binary opposition between West and East. This discursive condemnation by the postcolonial elites targets not only Western tourists but also ordinary citizens seeking to earn a living through tourism. In 1986, UNESCO classified (according to criteria I, II, III and IV) the ancient capital of the Vijayanagar empire, in the state of Karnataka (Cf. document 1). If Hampi is a UNESCO classified site, the locality is also an important place of pilgrimage. Apart from the pilgrims who went to the temple of Virupaksha, home of Hampi, and a handful of hippies, the city was not a popular travel destination during the 1980s. Gradually, in the mid-1990s, private bus companies established a second line between Goa and Hampi. This attracted a different crowd, mainly young, “tired” international tourists from the crowded beaches of Goa. Their presence helped to restructure the local tourist offerings: many Indian families not originating from Hampi came to settle there to open inns, offering non-vegetarian cuisine and alcohol: elements which are hardly tolerated in a sacred site. Domestic tourism also intensified during the same decade, making Hampi a place where several categories of tourists juxtapose.

Document 1: Hampi, from the cultural landscape to the classified site

Whilst entire villages are included within the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage site, Hampi has never been recognized as constituting a cultural landscape (a constructed landscape associating the monuments left with legacies of granite chaos, rice fields and sugar cane fields) but only as a simple "site", which greatly affected the ability to put in place a conservation policy involving experts and residents. Only Hindu and Jain temples, tombs, mosques and other monuments under the responsibility of the Archeological Survey of India and the State Archeology Department are taken into consideration by this heritage policy.

• 7 This plan recommended a fluid and comprehensive vision of the heritage policy while calling for a p (...)

8 https://www.deccanherald.com/content/187423/probe-sought-eviction-families-hampi.html

17 In 1999, UNESCO classified Hampi among the World Heritage sites in danger due to the anarchic urbanization, in particular around the Virupaksha temple. In 2002, the Karnataka Legislative Assembly took into account UNESCO’s recommendations and set up the Hampi World Heritage Area Management Authority (HWHAMA). Although an Integrated Management Plan 7 , developed by Nalini Thakur, has been drafted and approved by the International Committee (ICOMOS), HWHAMA did not adopt it. In 2006, a master plan was adopted for Hampi by this same authority, leading to a process of museumification and the eviction of hundreds of families. At the end of July 2011 (after 5 years of inaction), the deputy commissioner of the district of Bellary (and member of HWHAMA) orally warned the inhabitants that the demolition of their shops and their houses must begin within 24 hours 8 . Early the next morning, the bulldozers begin their work. More than 320 families lost their homes and livelihoods.

• 9 http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2011/nov/28/asi-nod-for-rehabilitation-of-hampi-en (...)

10 https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/others/virupapura-gadde/articleshow/47114272.cms

• 11 As such, in 2015, Mahesh Sharma, then Minister of Tourism and member of the Hindu nationalist Bhara (...)

18 Out of all these families, who had been settled for more than two decades, only eleven had legal documents, which further complicated their resettlement and the establishment of financial compensation 9 . What is troubling about these demolition and eviction actions (there were other acts in 2015 and 2017) 10 is the rhetoric used to justify it and make it legitimate. Indeed, these were preceded by firm and vehement condemnations of the behavior of international tourists and of the whole economy which revolves around them. It must be said that in recent years, “ the seemingly innocent and perfectly secular agenda of promoting tourism has become a channel for pumping taxpayers’ money into promoting temples, ashrams, and pilgrimage spots ” (Nanda, 2011, p. 109). Hinduism increasingly dominates the public sphere thanks to neoliberal economic policies which benefit the Hindu gods and Hindu nationalism. An important element in this process is what Nanda calls the "state-temple-corporate complex" in which pilgrimage tourism is an important element in the trivialization of Hindu nationalism (Nanda, 2011, pp. 108-111). As Bloch (2017) shows, the discourse of these priests is imbued with a discursive construction which is the inverted image of Orientalism. This essentialized discourse on the West suggests tourists from these countries are "barbarians" (Bloch, 2017), immoral, hypocritical, decadent, materialistic, alienated and with mores totally incompatible with a pilgrimage site (consumption of meat, alcohol and unbridled sexuality). Westerners pose a threat to the national identity understood here as Hindu 11 . This discursive condemnation also targets these non-Hampi nationals who came to profit from tourism. By evicting them and destroying their homes, these religious elites create new forms, this time internal, of subalternity (Bloch, 2017).

• 12 One could say that the vision of Western tourists and the vision of Hindu nationalists are similar (...)

19 Thus, if Orientalism remains the basis of the tourist identity of India for many Western travelers, tourism becomes a political instrument for the federal government, allowing the rewriting of the national myth by erasing the stigma of colonization and by reifying the West at the same time as it reifies India. 12 “ There is pride in many Indians who are overcome by their status as an ancient colonized people, to see all these white people admire Hindu temples of the 8th century, to pay a sort of homage to a civilization which is thus found to be rehabilitated ” (Landy, 1993, p. 100). Hampi illustrates how the power relations enshrined in tourism and nationalism intersect postcolonial societies and produce regimes of citizenship. Indeed, according to Chatterjee, “official nationalism has a performative as well as a pedagogical function. In the performative mode, it must display the unity and singularity of the nation and the equal place within it of all citizens. In the pedagogical mode, however, official nationalism must reckon with the fact that all citizens cannot be treated equally, because all are not yet ‘proper’ citizens; they must be educated into full membership of the ‘true” body of national citizens” (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 155).

B. Colonial heritage and Hindu nationalism: towards a reconstruction of the national narrative through tourism?

20 It is in this sense that special attention must also be paid to the offensive tourism campaigns launched by India since 2002, the launch date of the first Incredible !ndia campaign whose objective was to develop a real branding strategy to consolidate the India destination. Several moments can be identified in this campaign. From 2002 to 2003 it was mainly a matter of publicizing the logo and the famous exclamation mark in place of the I of India generating surprise. Once the brand was positioned and known, the campaign then focused (2004 to 2005) on the dissemination of images related to spiritual tourism. From 2006 to 2007, it was mainly a question of deconstructing Orientalism by creating a gap between the image and the few lines of text highlighted. From 2007, the campaigns multiplied and the messages were adapted to the target market. The latest campaign this time features Westerners. Note that from 2004 to 2014, the BJP does not govern but is only in the position of an opposition political party. These campaigns not only embody economic tools designed to increase the balance of payments, but also constitute a privileged platform for defining geopolitical positions and reviving the image of the country as a rising world power (Geary, 2013). The broader ideological meanings that surround this nation branding effort must be taken into consideration (Fan, 2006).

• 13 This postcolonial nationalism is also accompanied by a desire to rename a certain number of cities (...)
• 14 The document is available online at: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/history-as-politics (...)

21 Bandyopadhyay et al. (2008) have thus analyzed the representations and perceptions of Indian heritage conveyed by the government, which creates dominant national stories, accepted by the tourism industry and then disseminated in the national popular media. There are, however, some notable differences in the use of Indian heritage by the Indian government and by the tourism industry. The first mobilizes nationalist rhetoric 13 and emphasizes the atrocities committed by the settlers and the heroic resistance of the people in their representation of the colonial heritage, while the second limits the representations of the colonial heritage to the physical attributes of the architecture of the time and hedonic pleasures, all decontextualized from the stigmata of colonization. More specifically, the government is staging a glorious past which is “ in some ways an attempt to assuage the hurt of having been reduced to being a colony ” (Thapar, 2003) 14 . Nationalists are returning to the Golden Age, and therefore invariably to Antiquity, that of the Vedas. Hindu nationalism is part of the total invention of a Hindu "nation" of origins, supposed to restore India to its lost vitality. Thus, nations claim to be ancient (Bhabha, 2007). Hinduism becomes the bedrock of an Indian nation believed to have existed for millennia in South Asia, rejecting the theory of Indo-Aryan migrations from Central Asia and Persia. This vision of history, still invalid according to the entire scientific corpus available in archeology and linguistics, offers the advantage of building an imaginary based on the idea of ​​ethnicity (Meyer, 2007). Promoting Hindutva (Indianness determined by birth in the Indian area, racial bond and registration in a geography of the sacred) amounts to nationalists doing India what it should never have cease to be if it had not been dominated by "strangers". The other, in this context, becomes a Muslim or a Christian, regardless of the age of their family roots.

22 More generally, these various promotional campaigns lead us to ask the following questions: who has the authority to speak? What values ​​are disseminated and represented? This question of Hindu nationalism finds a particular echo with the mobilization of the figure of Mother India or Bharat Mata in the Incredible !Ndia campaign, revealing relevant forms of hybridization. In Hindu nationalism, Bharat Mata embodies the personification of India as a deity. This iconography of national identity is generally represented in a saffron-colored sari, the head wearing a crown, with a map of India in the background, and the Indian tricolor is generally placed in a very visible manner on the picture. This allegory of India which symbolizes the union between nationality and divinity, is today included in the last Incredible campaign !Ndia marking with force the links between geopolitics and tourism. According to Geary, “ In this final case, ‘Motherland: India’ is not only about destination marketing, but it is also about appropriating the “Other” into its global nationalist vision: a creative device with particular resonance for the Indian diaspora who may wish to return to the motherland as tourists and potential investors ” (Geary, 2013, p. 54).

Document 2: Motherland: India (Copyright Incredible !Ndia)

II. Situations between two: hybridization of subjectivities?

• 15 Note that India's tourism advertising does not explicitly target a European or Western audience. Th (...)

23 The various campaigns carried out under the Incredible !Ndia brand, thus testify to a gradual disengagement of India from the binary East / West opposition by integrating these two polarities, thought to be diametrically opposed, in the same impetus. By multiplying the stylistic devices mixing humor and discrepancy, the communication media manage to show a distance between the Indian identity and the subjects presented, demonstrating that India knows how to use Orientalism as a means of communication to its advantage. Thus, India goes beyond the only perspective of "self-orientalism" which would mean that Orientalism is not simply an autonomous creation of the West, but that the East participates in the construction and the reinforcement of the Orientalist images, to offer hybrid forms of communication also aimed at an audience thought of as multiple and diverse 15 .

Document 3: Incredible !ndia "Not all Indians are polite, hospitable and vegetarians"

• 16 The Indian government distinguishes between international tourist arrivals (ITA) and foreign touris (...)

24 These images make it possible to attract members of the Indian diaspora, a privileged target of successive governments since the mid-1990s. From a theoretical point of view, the mobilities aroused by the diasporas “ are particularly interesting, because they usually transcend categories used to capture tourist flows, opposing the international to the domestic: between inside and outside, they necessarily question the host country as the country of departure in the transnational construction project they can carry out ” (Peyvel, 2017, p. 306). Social obligations (maintenance of family ties, kinship, obligation to render and receive hospitality), but also to go to see, to soak up, to confront one’s imagination with reality, to find traces of the life before told by a parent, generate significant tourist flows linked to a need to experience physical proximity. These obligations give rise to various tourism practices which are the subject of the institutionalization process of the highly coveted category of Non Resident Indians (NRI). In 2016, 5.77 million NRI arrivals were recorded in India, with a growth rate of 9.7% compared to 2015 (report from the Ministry of Tourism 2017-2018), representing almost 40% of international tourists 16 .

• 17 .While the old middle classes were curbed in their consumption by the socialism of Nehru or the ide (...)
• 18 Marketing slogan popularized by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party for the 2004 Indian ge (...)

25 The Indian neoliberal and post-colonial state thus builds varied and contradictory images of what India is and what the inhabitants are, appealing to multiple audiences on changing axes. They themselves engages in the production or reproduction of multiple centers and peripheries. As Coles and Dallen write, tourist accounts explain to diaspora communities " who they are and how they came to be " (2004, p. 13). In this case, as Patil (2011a) suggests, this idea should be applied to the Indian middle classes whose emblem would be embodied by the practices of NRIs. With development, lifestyles are changing and, in particular, access to leisure is emerging. The new middle class or NMC could represent an embodiment of India engaged in its liberal transition (Fernandez, 2006) 17 . This induces large-scale economic and spatial transformations making extreme poverty and opulence coexist, defining India as an "iceberg country" (Landy and Varrel, 2015, p. 6) marked by multiple large socio-spatial differences. This educated and English-speaking NMC, whose consumption practices are “ a sign of the promise of a new national model of development, one with a global outlook that will allow India to catch up with larger processes of economic globalization ” (Fernandes, 2000, p. 92), seems encouraged to adopt a new subjectivity. Shining India 18 is another term associated with the desire and ability to appreciate and move forward in this new development model made of promises of comfort and prosperity where new professional groups (from the information technology sectors), new consumption spaces and new practices are the most obvious markers. Access to these new practices is also all that makes it possible to maintain the mechanisms of social distinction which combine with the classic lines of cleavage that are caste and kinship, while giving them a new meaning. As Brosius states, “ now in the light of India Shining, groups as heterogeneous as the new middle classes make new claims to cosmopolitanism as a way of life. The claim is to belong to "world-class" and still remain "distinctly Indian". […] Cosmopolitanism is not a state but a discursive process through which the new middle classes in India (and overseas) seek to reach and stabilize their ’ideal’ position in the social field. It shapes the ways in which people consume and experience pleasure, or anxiety ” (Brosius, 2010, pp. 25 and 28).

26 This is how Puducherry tends to become a “ hyper-place ” (Lussault, 2017), a signature of the world where Western and Indian tourists rub shoulders. This co-presence seems to be reinforced to the extent that many players in tourism seem to play exoticism for profit, by developing products that conform to colonial imaginaries, in furniture, the scenography used, the atmospheres recreated, the distinction staged between the former colonial city, known as “white”, and the Tamil city (formerly called “black” city), the creation of heritage archetypes, etc. This desire to “ consume colonial nostalgia ” (Peleggi, 2005) drives projects for the redevelopment of the city and the rehabilitation of heritage. Through these development policies, it is more the search for profits sustained by the expansion of tourism than a sensitive and nuanced construction of memory that would avoid causing grievances - whether based on political cleavages or contrasting ideological interests - which is sought after.

Document 4: Flow de tourists to Puducherry (2004-2018)

19 One Crore equals 10 million rupies

27 The continued growth of domestic tourism in Puducherry is due to a concerted effort by the government and private tourism operators. As Mohamed Mansoor (Minister of Tourism of Puducherry) points out, “ our focus is now on the domestic tourism. Because we don’t need to do any campaign of communication to attract the foreigners. Thanks to this international township constituted by Auroville, the foreigners are naturally attracted by Puducherry when they arrive in India. Regarding the Indian tourists, if they come to Tamil Nadu, if they come to Mahabalipuram, we can make them to come here. It is our duty. We don’t have a big promotional program, a big budget like other states. So what we are trying to maximize is the Indian traveler who is now much flusher with money, with a high disposal income, like software workers, probably CEO (chief executive officer) of the company, who can take decisions, to come here as the part of a pleasure and leisure ”(interview extract, June 6, 2019). Thus, sustained tourism marketing campaigns carried out by the government have targeted high-end visitors from the major urban centers of the region, such as Chennai (capital of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, formerly known as Madras) and Bengaluru (the capital of Karnataka, formerly Bangalore). Puducherry stands out among weekend and leisure destinations in India (lower taxes on liquor sales also play an important role). However, the strategy of the tourism department, as it was described to me by Mohamed Mansoor, now aims to make Puducherry a long-stay destination. It is not a question of attracting more tourists, but of lengthening the duration of their stay, " so we were a weekend gateway, now we are positioning ourselves as a long destination. So we have adding seven new beaches, for a total cost of 80 crores 19 .

28 We have to provide more reasons to stay in Puducherry. What we hope to do is to tell them different stories. You have to experience. This is not enough to see. Seeing to feeling. Storytelling is important. Intach is doing this job, but only on the French angle, we go beyond. Colonial legacy is important in our project, but if you are telling stories you should be able to tell all the stories. Nearby Puducherry the Dutch were there as the Portuguese in Porto Novo. This is not well documented, but Indians could be attracted by these stories ”.

• 20 Among them is the creation of a handicraft interpretation center and an interpretation center for A (...)

29 To do many heritage rehabilitation projects new constructions 20 are underway. For him, strategically it is politically expedient to claim a distinct identity based on French colonial history. The latter having been the sole cause of the creation of Puducherry as a postcolonial political and administrative entity, this heritage is now underlined as a factor conferring a distinct identity on the continued existence of the territory of the Union. It is this distinction that brings Indian tourists. For him, it’s about capitalizing on the latter. Circuits based on this former French establishment in India are developing for the urban middle classes of Chennai and Bangaluru.

Document 4: A cosmopolitan middle class

Like every weekend, the restaurants in the "white town" are experiencing their peak attendance. NMC members flock there to testify in photos of their way of consumption. If alcohol has been a serious health problem since the 19th century (for a long time alcohol was much cheaper in Puducherry because of the border with Tamil Nadu, then rigorist and prohibitionist), the novelty lies in a consumption that is done in another register, that of worldliness. Of course alcohol continues to be a typical strainer for the social weight of the caste system, a sort of fatalistic despair, but it gives rise to new ways of dealing with space. If its consumption remains mostly hidden (a male audience locking themselves up in a hotel room to drink and play), for the NMC, it is a question of staging it, “for many members of the new urban and educated middle classes the consumption of alcohol in public has been socially stigmatized as a westernized and morally weak practice. Hence, to them, the introduction of drinks as a means of socializing is a challenge to some groups” (Brosius, 2010, p. 16).

• 21 Our contact is one of the trustees of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Pondi (...)
• 22 This is what I saw during the heritage visits organized by INTACH or even by Storytrail, during its (...)

30 The otherness sought by tourists resides in the illusion of going back in time, of having for a moment the sensation of discovering French India. This is why India invites us to think post-post-colonialism. Of course, we do not omit the existence of old, popular and massive mobility practices like pilgrimages, especially since the Sri Aurobindo Ashram has long polarized considerable flows towards Pondicherry. However, “ the young people who live in Bangalore, they want to come to the seaside and then there is the French influence, the French side, and then in the evening the promenade, the seafront ” (extract from an interview conducted with one of the members of INTACH 21 on 12/20/2018). This generational gap is noticeable in all of the interviews that I was able to conduct. If the colonial past of Pondicherry is never mentioned head-on, cosmopolitanism, the quality of public spaces (the fact that you can get around on foot), architecture (and particularly the doors of houses) are highlighted as triggers for the visit. For Indian tourists, it is the French colonial heritage that constitutes the timeless past to visit. Here as elsewhere, tourist activity requires variety, otherness. Puducherry represents something unusual in India for the members of this NMC. The strange idea that India has had business with France vaguely haunts consciences, or remains to be discovered, often with astonishment, because colonial buildings keep a certain power of evocation and pique the curiosity of individuals 22 .

31 As for the Indians, “ India is dying of monotony; the British colonial heritage is the predominant historical context, the heritage of more marginal colonial stories may appear as a factor which gives localities a unique identity from a tourist perspective ” (interview with Raphaël M. of September 13, 2019, members INTACH make similar comments). Puducherry therefore arouses an inverted exoticism among its visitors. “ The Indians consume a colonial heritage there which they describe as picturesque and charming, they come to find another atmosphere there. In a way, we French people find Pondicherry close enough to us (culturally, even visually perhaps) and yet sufficiently distant, mysterious (since unknown) and strange to be desirable, but for diametrically opposite reasons. All the elements of a myth, an illusion, a mirage are there ” (interview with Raphaël M. on September 13, 2019).

23 «  A dynamic in which multiple pasts jostle against each other in a heterogenous present  ».

• 24 Tourism stakeholders: INTACH, the Ministry of Tourism and Smart city mission (to name only the most (...)

32 All this testifies to a dynamic in which several pasts collide in a heterogeneous present (Rothberg, 2013, p. 372) 23 . The Ministry of Tourism of this city with such a special status as the various players in tourism play on these imaginations. This is particularly noticeable through the city logo ‘Peaceful Pondicherry. Give time a break ’, operations to rehabilitate heritage and rehabilitate old industrial spaces into places of culture (like the project to transform the old distillery). More generally, this city branding, where the white city (White Town) becomes an element of the story of urban marketing, is embedded in the smart-city project in which tourism is an essential element of the production of the neoliberal city 24 .

Document 5: A server observing the "beach road", when the term "white town" becomes a selling point

This slogan “Come, eat, drink, relax we are in white town” displayed on the back of all the shirts of the waiters at this waterfront restaurant perfectly illustrates the fact that hybridization is inseparably political, since it modifies the common space between them. According to Bhabha, "third space, although unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation which attest that cultural meaning and symbols have no primordial unity or fixity, and that the same signs can be appropriate, translated, rehistoricized and reinterpreted” (Bhabha, 2007, p. 82).

33 Most of the tourists who travel to Puducherry come from the new urban bourgeoisie and are employed in the growing ICT (information and communication technology) sector. They mainly come from Bangaluru, Chennai and Pune. The Puducherry landscape is changing to satisfy this new economic activity. In the epicenter of the festive and recreational sociability of "White Town" (south-eastern part of the city in the process of becoming heritage), small shops have disappeared just like street vendors, rejected beyond this perimeter, giving way to financial investors coming from Mumbai or belonging to the Franco-Pondicherry diaspora. Within this perimeter, everything is dedicated to what constitutes the substance of this NMC: consumption. It is not only a question of eating or drinking, but above all of staging these actions because they are the ones that make it possible to count in Indian society, to be visible. Consumption is, in short, an act of recognition and this act is highly codified.

Document 6: The café des arts

As is often the case in Suffren Street, many Indian tourists stroll around and especially take a photo in front of the facade of the "café des arts", where everything recalls the old continent. It is true that from now on Puducherry supplies in abundance everything that could appear to be attached to France, to its culture (street names written in French, bakery, Breton crêperie, tricolor, institutions). This storefront is one of the most photographed in Pondicherry and reveals multiple verbal transactions and contortions as to the ideal location for the perfect selfie, which will then be posted on social media.

• 25 Some of these images are featured in this campaign YouTube channel video of the campaign Incredible (...)

34 In 2017, to reach this NMC clientele, the Indian government launched a new tourism promotion campaign aimed in particular at enhancing the Northeast States. This campaign objective and exoticizes the so-called "tribal" populations. The slogan is evocative: “ North East, paradise unexplored ”, and the advertising campaigns persist in broadcasting images of “traditional” communities, deeply anchored in their environment, as if the colonial construction of the savage was found by a postcolonial detour in India 25 . This representation relies heavily on a very nostalgic version of the era of colonial exploration. Indeed, these spaces located at the margin, are supposed wild, covered with inhospitable and strange vegetation sheltering rare and often dangerous animals. This new frontier of tourism is reminiscent of the tourist experiences described by Lucie Dejouhanet who has clearly shown in what ways the Adivasis populations who live further south, in the Ghats mountains and on their foothills, " have been attached two essentialist visions which still influence the way people look at them: that of preserved tribes living in harmony with nature in an approach of ecological romanticism, and that of backward peoples, who have remained outside of civilization ” (Dejouhanet, 2017). All this illustrating the performative effects of the “magic triangle” (Abélès and Cullerai, 2001) based on the idea spread within tourism of a common singularity of groups, places and lifestyles, otherwise known as a deterministic association between a culture, a territory and an identity.

• 26 It is also a question of developing tourism in these territorial confines to ensure control of thes (...)

Document 7: The Northeast, the new frontier 26 for tourism? (Copyright: Incredible! India)

Conclusion: towards new asymmetries: Tribals and Dalits, the new "damned" of tourism?

35 Through this study we wanted to show how multiple actors mobilize tourist imaginations to support or redefine collective identities. We have shown how these imaginaries are shaped by the mark of contested stories (those of imperialism, colonialism, decolonization and, more recently, neoliberal restructuring) and in return how they reshape these stories. In this, postcolonial theories open up the perspective of third space, making it possible to escape from binary visions to propose a third way: that of hybridization.

36 “ Who controls the tourist area? Who is excluded? To what extent do the struggles for the tourist space contribute to the reproduction, or on the contrary, to the redefining of social hierarchies? ” (Marie dit Chirot, 2018, p. 12). In the Indian case, this questioning is particularly relevant for a country marked by a strong linguistic, social and religious heterogeneity corresponding to as many contradictory accounts of the nation, its heritage and its identity. The Hindu identity advocated by the Indian state is not that put forward by the Pondicherry Tourism Department or what the consumption practices of NMC members tell us. By aligning with the western reference of "world class city", the members of the latter do not only mimic Western modernity, they compose with, by arranging local conditions and in particular another dimension inherent in the Indian case: caste.

37 There are many forgotten about the development, at the forefront of which are the "Adivasis", which in a way allow the NMC to replicate a colonial subjectivity in a postcolonial context, but also the ex-Untouchables , the Dalits. The latter appear, to use Fanon’s terminology, as "the damned" of India and of tourism in India, largely justifying the words of Boukhris and Chapuis: " tourism practices appear as products of social relationships and their analysis allows to rethink politics as the expression of a conflicting social world, based on antagonistic relationships between social groups ” (2016). However, many analysts of Indian society claim that the rise of the NMC, which reflects the major changes in India (the economic shift to the tertiary sector, urbanization but also fragmentation), would necessarily imply the weakening and decline of old identities by which we used to have a hold on Indian society: castes and communities. However, the antagonistic caste reports continue in tourism and I would like to conclude by giving the floor to Appu, a guide originally from Tiruvannāmalai who settled in Pondicherry when he was eighteen years old. Appu only works with western tourists because:

“In India, as soon as you face other Indians, the question that keeps coming up is always who? Not who I am in a metaphysical sense, but who are you? Who is this guide there in front of me? Which means where does it come from? What is his religion? But above all what is his caste? I come from a slum in Tiruvannāmalai, I am a Dalit, an untouchable. Even if it is not visible it looks like I carry it within me. People only call me once. They quickly discover that I am a Dalit and no longer want to call on my services. This is why I work with Westerners and only Westerners, because they are looking for what is metaphysical. This "caste-line" they do not perceive it. To this "caste-line" in India must be added the "color-line" and the supposed qualities which one attributes to certain categories of people. You have noticed that in large hotel groups and restaurants the workforce is not Tamil but Nepalese. All this to avoid social conflict. They are above ground here and can be bribed at will. I don’t envy them. […] It is often that Indians call me to ask me how I manage to be friends with Westerners and especially women. One day, one of them, he was from Pune, wanted to approach one of my clients, originally from the United States, I told her about it and she said yes. The guy immediately put down his business card, said that he already went to the United States for the holidays and gave the amount of his expenses during his vacation. He concluded that in Pondicherry he was spending $ 1,000 a day. The conversation ended there. You see, this social class that everyone calls middle-class looks like it can only be accomplished with money, that money also means status. I also earn a lot of money, but I do not feel that I belong to this social class because it does not erase the other lines of power. In addition you must consume, consume. It is this consumption that has brought about a culture that did not exist before: that of cafes. They’re all looking for that, to mime the West, to sit, drink coffee and take selfies. But in Europe it’s different, tell me if I’m wrong but there’s what you call the welfare state. Here there is a middle-class and no welfare state. And a middle class which defends its interests by associations and NGOs. So we are still losers. To believe in the market, in consumption is bullshit. This generates even more exclusion and poverty. This is why my money I invest it in my community, with the members of my slum” (extract from an interview conducted on 12/21/18 in Pondicherry). The interest of postcolonial studies is thus twofold: it allows us to think about hegemonies but also to question the political dimension of tourism.

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1 Following the work of Peyvel, rather than internal tourism, I prefer to speak of domestic tourism because this expression reflects a process of appropriation of new skills in order to build, for the societies in question, their own recreational mobility: it is a way of taming new practices. Tourism is indeed "a medium through which people can acquire knowledge, build a renewed vision of themselves and societies" (Peyvel, 2019, p. 20).

2 "One of the current challenges of tourism research could then consist in renewing the framework of a materialist interpretation of the facts of tourism, while avoiding the pitfalls of critical approaches which have long dominated this field of research, in particular in geography" (Marie Dit Chirot, 2017).

3 Even though the discourse of the orientalists underlined a deep rooting of India in the tradition and the religion, this profusion terms undoubtedly testifies to the perplexity, even the growing anxiety among the Western countries, to note that India (a developing country, "third-world") will soon claim the status of industrialized country (or "first-world"), or even exceed the economies and hegemonies of the West.

4 In 2006, the name officially returned to the pre-colonial denomination, Puducherry. Both internationally and in India, it remains known as Pondicherry, which explains why this colonial name continues to be used in tourism promotion materials, where it has the potential to attract attention to something more immediately familiar to the public.

5 All these specialists were and are specifically attached to the study of Sanskrit and Vedic texts even though contemporary India appears as one of the leaders of new communications, those related to information technology and the outsourcing of services or BPO (Business Process Outsourcing).

6 “Located its own subjectivity in the spiritual domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West and hence undominated and sovereign” (Chatterjee, 1989: 632).

7 This plan recommended a fluid and comprehensive vision of the heritage policy while calling for a participatory approach. It has been considered a model of its kind that can be replicated at other sites (Kammeier, 2007).

9 http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2011/nov/28/asi-nod-for-rehabilitation-of-hampi-encroachers-314706.html

11 As such, in 2015, Mahesh Sharma, then Minister of Tourism and member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), declared that "for their own safety, women foreign tourists should not wear short dresses and skirts. . . Indian culture is different from the western » ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/india-female-tourists-skirts-safety-advice ).

12 One could say that the vision of Western tourists and the vision of Hindu nationalists are similar and complementary: "It is that the images of India are also, in part, produced in India" (Louiset, 2008, p. 9).

13 This postcolonial nationalism is also accompanied by a desire to rename a certain number of cities and public places to erase the Muslim heritage of the country: in 2017, the State of Uttar Pradesh removed the name of the Taj Mahal from its tourist brochure.

14 The document is available online at: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/history-as-politics/219991

15 Note that India's tourism advertising does not explicitly target a European or Western audience. The same ads, with the same images and the same titles, have been used worldwide.

16 The Indian government distinguishes between international tourist arrivals (ITA) and foreign tourist arrivals (FTA). The first term includes both NRI and the FTA

17 .While the old middle classes were curbed in their consumption by the socialism of Nehru or the ideals of austerity of Gandhi, this NMC owes its explosion to the laws of economic liberalization and to the media revolution of the decade 1990 diffusing models of freedom and self-fulfillment. Of course, I do not omit the debates on what this NMC means and its limits, but what is relevant is that the expansion of this NMC is not only numerical, NMC is also a subjective category of self-Identification

18 Marketing slogan popularized by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party for the 2004 Indian general elections, which referred to the general feeling of economic optimism of the time.

20 Among them is the creation of a handicraft interpretation center and an interpretation center for Arikamedu, an old port dedicated to trade with Ancient Rome

21 Our contact is one of the trustees of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage Pondicherry. This organization is an ambiguous player in heritage planning policies in Pondicherry because it is both a prescriber, a prime contractor, and also provides contracting authority for beautification operations. Like all the major players in heritage planning policies in Pondicherry, they are not local Tamils but North Indians (and/or foreigners and they all belong to an English-speaking bourgeois elite), and all have the same vision of what Pondicherry should be: a clean, hygienic, peaceful city, free of its poor, in other words, those who cannot consume.

22 This is what I saw during the heritage visits organized by INTACH or even by Storytrail, during its discovery trail entitled "French connections trail" (https:// www.storytrails.in/trails/french- connections-trail /).

24 Tourism stakeholders: INTACH, the Ministry of Tourism and Smart city mission (to name only the most important) do not share the same vision of heritage and what deserves to be the subject of a heritage policy. For example, the distillery and the old prison (the last 18th century building in Pondicherry) were razed, the first to become a museum space, the second a parking lot, because for some actors it was not a question of heritage.

25 Some of these images are featured in this campaign YouTube channel video of the campaign Incredible !ndia : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW_EJ1UCseQ

26 It is also a question of developing tourism in these territorial confines to ensure control of these border territories of China and Bangladesh. Note that this objective does not exist in the case described by Lucie Dejouhanet, which proves that ethnic tourism can develop without a geopolitical objective.

Table des illustrations

Pour citer cet article, référence électronique.

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud , « Coloniality and tourism: the fabric of identities and alterities in India », Via [En ligne], 16 | 2019, mis en ligne le 30 mars 2020, consulté le 18 juin 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/4251 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.4251

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud

French Institute of Pondicherry, UMIFRE 21 CNRS-MEAE University of Bordeaux, IUT de Bordeaux, UMR 5115 LAM

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Colonial Heritage and Tourism: Ethnic Landscape Perspectives (2015)

2015, Journal of Heritage Tourism

The revival of colonial heritage is a particular feature of former British and French colonies in Pacific and Asian settings. This is exemplified by the redevelopment and rejuvenation of what were exclusive ‘comfort zones’ for the ‘colonial classes’ and is central to the consumption of colonial nostalgia via tourism. The political and semiotic implications of renewing colonial era constructions for tourism are manifold. The key argument is that this can re-politicise what were hitherto benign colonial heritages. Furthermore, this can aggravate tensions within what are already fragile ethnic landscapes. This is especially so when the setting is one where the various publics have been steeped in economic, cultural and sociopolitical change, and where political and civil upheavals are recent occurrences. If the restoration of colonial heritage for tourism (in this case for heritage hotels) in former colonies is conducted oblivious to the legacies and meanings instilled in such heritages, the exacerbation of social and political sensitivities is likely.

Related Papers

Helle Jørgensen

This ethnographic study explores postcolonial Indian perspectives on the production and consumption of the former French colony Puducherry as a destination for colonial heritage tourism, asking: how does colonial heritage capture the imagination of domestic visitors, and what are the rationales amongst local residents and authorities that promote this destination for its colonial heritage? It demonstrates how the use of Puducherry’s French legacy is a postcolonial phenomenon which has been a product of Indian interests. A central argument is that we need to investigate the postcolonial complexities of restaging colonial heritage in tourism without assuming a simple dichotomy between tourists from former colonial powers and formerly colonised countries, which has often formed the baseline of postcolonial tourism research.

Asia-Pacific Viewpoint, Special Issue: Place, Memory and Identity 46(3)

Maurizio Peleggi

Reprinted in Tourism in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2018), vol. 1, Chap 8.

Ranjan Bandyopadhyay

Hospitality and tourism scholars have acknowledged the significance of colonial nostalgia for the discipline; however, much needs to be done to analyse the consequences involved. Using the theoretical background of postcolonialism and whiteness studies, this study attends to this significant research gap by exploring British tourists' pursuit of colonial nostalgia through tourism, thus emphasizing that colonial nostalgia is a distinctively hospitality and tourism social science phenomenon. British tourists visiting Kolkata and Darjeeling in India were interviewed and the results revealed that these tourists are proud of the British Empire and visit India to resurrect those golden days when Britannia ruled the waves and bask in the glory of the Raj and its 'Anglophilia'. The British tourists' attitude on one hand expressed their pride of being a superior race compared to the savage Indians, and on the other, justified their support for the legacy of the British Empire.

carla guerron montero

Journal of Heritage Tourism

In 2009, a 55-feet tall Kuang-Im statue, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, was built next to “Bridge on the River Kwai” in Kachanaburi, Thailand as part of a new Buddhist temple complex. The move was derided by international conservation groups and advocacy groups representing ex-servicemen and prisoners of war (POW) in World War II. The protest focused on two key points: firstly, the statue adversely affected the visual appreciation of the landmark representing the Thai-Burma Railway built in World War II. Secondly, erecting a Buddhist statue next to a heritage site is seen as being insensitive to the religious belief of Allied POWs buried in the Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery nearby. Even though the protest died down without halting the construction of the statue and the temple, issues particular to the management of such transnational heritage sites was bought to the forefront. Firstly, what types of development are considered sensitive and appropriate for sites that embodied shared heritage and strong emotions; secondly how does tourist development affect the the war heritage and local identity of Tha Makham. Drawing from the conference’s discussion theme “Does heritage shape tourism or does tourism shape cultural heritage”, this paper will show how the town, Tha Makham in Kanchanaburi, Thailand was first conceived as a representation of the bridge in the movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. It will then highlight examples of how elements of war heritage are appropriated to attract international and local visitors. Lastly, the paper will look at the two approaches for tourism espoused by various stakeholders, a conservation-driven approach versus a profit-driven one.

Indonesia …

Victor King

Elizabeth Krause

The Journal of Asian Studies

Susan Russell

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Valerio Simoni

Tourism affects the lives of an increasing number of people across the world and has been growing and diversifying immensely since the turn of the 21st century. Anthropological approaches to tourism have also expanded from the early contributions of the 1970s, which tended to focus on the nature of tourism and its “impact” on peripheral host communities. These first interventions see anthropologists theorizing tourism as a “secular ritual,” studying its workings as a process of “acculturation,” and countering macroeconomic views of tourism’s potential for the economic development of peripheral societies by underscoring instead its neocolonial and imperialist features. Tourism is linked to the exacerbation of center-periphery dependencies, seen as an agent of cultural commoditization and responsible for the promotion and dissemination of stereotypical images of people and places. Moving beyond the impact paradigm, which has the disadvantage of portraying tourism as an external, disembedded, and imposed force on a passive population, constructivist approaches highlight its creative appropriations and integral role in the reinvention of culture and traditions. Anthropologists pay attention to the varied range of actors and agencies involved in tourism, accounting for the multi-scalar dimensions of this phenomenon and the uneven circulation of images, discourses, and resources it engenders. Tourism exerts a powerful global influence on how alterity and difference are framed and understood in the contemporary world and contributes to the valorization and dissemination of particular views of culture, identity, and heritage. Tourism is increasingly intertwined with processes of heritage-making, whose study helps advance anthropological reflections on cultural property, material culture, and the memorialization of the past. A key source of livelihood for a growing number of people worldwide, tourism is also becoming more and more associated with development projects in which applied anthropologists are also enrolled as experts and consultants. The study of the tourism-development nexus continues to be a key area of theoretical innovation and has helped advance anthropological debates on North–South relations, dominant responses to poverty and inequality, and their entanglements with neoliberal forms of governance. Given its diffuse and distributed character, tourism and touristification have been approached as forms of ordering that affect and restructure an ever-growing range of entities, and whose effects are increasingly difficult to tease out from concomitant societal processes. The ubiquitous implementations of tourism policies and projects, the influx of tourists, and the debates, reactions, and resistances these generate underscore, however, the importance of uncovering the ways tourism and its effects are being concretely identified, invoked, acted upon, and confronted by its various protagonists. Research on tourism has the potential to contribute to disciplinary debates on many key areas and notions of concern for anthropology. Culture, ethnicity, identity, alterity, heritage, mobility, labor, commerce, hospitality, intimacy, development, and the environment are among the notions and domains increasingly affected and transformed by tourism. The study of tourism helps understand how such transformations occur, uncovering their features and orientations, while also shedding light on the societal struggles that are at stake in them. The analysis of past and current research shows the scope of the theoretical and methodological debates and of the realms of intervention to which anthropological scholarship on tourism can contribute.

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Neocolonial Tourism: How We Can All Be More Conscious Travellers

23 July, 2020

In our post-colonial world, the influence of the West is deep-rooted across many cities. We consider the impact of foreign gentrification and how to travel in a way that promotes meaningful experiences and supports local communities.

O n On a recent trip to Morocco with friends, I travelled south from Tangier, through several cities and expansive desert, before winding up in Marrakech . En route, we’d built up a good rapport with Mohammed, our desert guide, so we met up with him again in the Red City.

I asked Mohammed for some local recommendations. Since two of my friends had already purchased several rugs on the trip, he rightly assumed that the group’s budget was ample and suggested a visit to El Fenn riad – it’s owned by Richard Branson’s sister, he added. Something about this irked me. My friend then said she’d overheard that the riad where we were staying was owned by a French couple. On top of that, we were about to eat lunch at a restaurant, owned by someone who heralds from Belgium and is now based in Marseille. This didn’t sit well. I’d had a wonderful time seeing Morocco , but it felt that many of the fashionable places that affluent Europeans visit in Marrakech are owned by “the West”. It felt like a far cry from the rest of the country.

To me, these establishments felt like an echo of the colonial era. Still with their hands firmly in decolonised Morocco , the French and other former-colonisers are able to pick and choose what elements of the country and its culture – raffia baskets or Berber cushions and rugs – they’d like for financial gain, profiting from the increased tourism to the country.

As someone from the UK, a country that has had one of the most privileged positions in history, I feel a responsibility to understand the impact of colonisation today. Are we repeating and creating neocolonial behaviours through travel and our interactions? How can I visit places without engaging in or continuing these patterns?

I was new to encountering this problem. While I’ve read widely around the subject of postcolonialism and try to avoid colonial behaviours in my own engagement with places, this was my first trip outside of Europe and the US. This experience of Marrakech could be considered just globalisation, a component of neocolonialism. However, globalisation typically manifests in encountering a McDonald’s wherever you visit or in the fact that many of the shops that now fill Spitalfields in London look almost identical to the shops that fill Soho, New York.

By contrast, what’s happening in Marrakech is foreign gentrification. Like globalisation, it’s a form of neocolonialism. This is amplified in Marrakech as the city popular with tourists taking short breaks. It’s been a fashionable destination for more than 50 years, making it an easy target for foreign gentrification. I now recall that my early introductions to the city were photographs taken during the Rolling Stones’ visit in the 60s and an episode of Absolutely Fabulous mocking the fashion world’s love of Marrakech. My preliminary exposure to the place was already through a specific lens as seen from White Western culture.

Foreign gentrification, by which I mean gentrification by those not based in or from the destination, is revealed in the fact that a place such as El Fenn is the most referenced riad and the one that was recommended to me most during my stay. It’s evident in the American-, English- and French-owned restaurants, luxury retreats and lodges that have boomed in line with increased tourism over the past 20 years, making sure that the West continues to financially benefit from visits to these places. It’s seen in the beach town of Essaouira , where new houses have been built primarily to serve as Airbnbs in response to the new budget airlines operate direct flights to the area. Gentrification gets conflated with globalisation as both phenomena hail largely from the West and tend to succeed on the premise that the West is the epicentre of global culture.

A neocolonial approach to travel is evident in the journeys made by many of those from the countries of former colonisers to decolonised nations. For instance, many holidaymakers from Europe and the US tend to visit coastal Jamaican towns where many White upper-class people live, rather than experiencing the energy of Kingston. Looking back, it explains why, in primary school, my classmates’ families would visit Sharm El-Sheikh over other Egyptian towns and cities.

One way to avoid such neocolonial travelling is to simply visit smaller, less mainstream cities, as opposed to gravitating towards areas filled with foreign-owned businesses. One of the main reasons we tend to do the latter is the increasingly frequent direct flights offered by budget airlines. Beyond their damaging environmental impact, these easily accessible routes have promoted overtourism and changed how we engage with certain destinations. Cities often frequented for short weekend city breaks have become subject to the problem of foreign gentrification: even in Western Europe, Lisbon and Berlin are prominent examples of this. Fleeting trips can sometimes mean that travellers invest less time in researching the places they visit, so they gravitate towards mainstream, Western-owned establishments, rather than engaging with the local area and its people. I see this happen with trips to the smaller of the Caribbean islands, too, as well as in the retreats of Bali and Sri Lanka .

In smaller cities, it is easier to tap into the character of a place and therefore enjoy a more meaningful experience. For example, the least gentrified places I visited in Morocco had been described in my previous research as boring, dingy and not worth more than a day trip. Yet in Ouarzazate, I discovered colourful circular shapes adorning the steel doors that have stayed in my mind since. The best blanket I found was not in Marrakech or Essaouira but in the storage unit of a bed-linen shop in Tinghir.

Before travelling to the Tangier , I’d read a criticism by writer and academic Hisham Aidi that the city’s Beat moment had been its heyday. Tangier’s famed writers such as Paul Bowles had never learned Arabic, nor befriended anyone that wasn’t from the West. They lived there in a closed-off Interzone. This common portrayal of Tangier having past its prime meant that I had to work hard to convince my friends to visit the city, never mind spend New Year’s Eve there, as we went on to do. Tangier was, in fact, the place where we experienced the best food, late-night cafés, music, architecture, fabric shops and hammams. It was one of our favourite places on the trip.

If you do visit a major city on your travels, the way to avoid funding foreign gentrification is to research the ownership of establishments where you intend to stay, dine and visit. Question the language used on their social media. Ask why you are drawn to the place. Are they adapting to appeal to your “Western” tastes? Indeed in Marrakech, there is no shortage of locally owned wonderful places to stay, eat, celebrate, but these often don’t appear in preliminary internet searches. Opt for activities that are more likely to pull you away from the more touristy destinations. Research community-run art collectives and spaces (such as Le18 in Marrakech) where local artists’ work can reach larger platforms and recognition.

As COVID-19 exacerbates many existing economic struggles on the world stage, the present decline in tourism has left many out of work. The reliance on the travel trade as the main industry for employment and income in many countries is a direct result and impact of colonialism. It is crucial that when we travel – especially White people like myself, from countries such as the UK – we spend our money supporting places run and owned by local communities or those who call that place home, and not simply supporting a Western elite that only invests in furthering its own wealth.

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Florida Seminole Tourism

Centering Anti-colonial Travel

Have you heard of anti-colonial travel? Recently, we have shared resources and quick tips for centering Indigenous communities. We can change tourism, and how it hurts (or helps)! In previous blog posts, we have discussed how to be an ethical ecotourist , how to appropriately consume Native goods , and cultural appropriation . This week, we will dive deep into anti-colonial travel. What does it mean? What does it look like in practice? Can you even do it? Also, read to the end for tips on how to be a more responsible traveler.

Shifts Towards Anti-colonial Travel

In many ways, issues that surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic left space to have conversations like this. How our actions impact people with means something. People began talking about responsible tourism, being an ethical traveler, and anti-colonial travel. While these topics have been talked about before, now a light was being shone on a broader scale. Things like wealth and health gaps and luxury tourism are getting a critical eye. And for good reason! With people becoming more vocal about socially responsible travel, it is becoming easier to see the gaps within the tourism industry. The structures we are so used to in tourism can harm the most vulnerable. So, we collectively need to do better. There is no way to go into a community without affecting it. But, you can have a positive impact instead of a negative one.

In many places in the United States, Indigenous communities are beginning to gain more traction in the tourism sector. In Hawaii, for the first time the Board of Directors for the Hawaiian Tourism Authority is majority led by Native Hawaiians . Conversations about land theft, National Parks, and land control are becoming common. Did you know in the United States, most national park land is not co-managed by Indigenous tribes? In fact, the Big Cypress National Preserve is one of only four national parks where tribes share co-management responsibilities. But, it may not be like that for long. The National Parks Service has recommitted to strengthening the role Tribal communities play in federal land management . For many Indigenous communities, this is a long-awaited moment. These shifts may seem small, but they have a huge impact on the communities that finally have agency.

Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, behind the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum

So, What is Anti-colonial Travel?

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the impact each person has on their community into focus. We all saw examples of travelers recklessly visiting Indigenous communities for a vacation. But, the negative impacts that travel can have go beyond the most recent pandemic. While tourism brings in much-needed dollars, it also brings harm . Sadly, there is a history of erasing and ignoring Indigenous communities for tourism. Tourism operates within a social, political, and financial framework developed by hundreds of years of exploitation and marginalization of Indigenous communities. So, how do we work against those structures? Tourism is about consumption of places. But, according to the YES! Magazine article: “’place’ isn’t an endlessly renewable commodity – it’s someone’s home.” We come to Florida for the beaches, the swamps, and the River of Grass. But, we forget that we are guests in someone’s home. The swamp is not unoccupied.

Beyond the implications, even the terms are heavy to unpack. What does being “anti-colonial” even mean? Similarly, what does it mean to “decolonize” something? Academics have spent a lot of time talking about decolonization. In the essay Decolonization is Not a Metaphor Tuck and Wayne Yang write that decolonization “demands an Indigenous framework and centering of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous ways of thinking.” Instead of centering a western perspective, you need to center Native communities to be anti-colonial. It is a conscious act of resistance. Thus, the first step to changing travel is to force travelers to recognize the effect they may have on communities and people they interact with. Working against the status quo is not an easy task. Being anti-colonial in your travel requires actively acknowledging these frameworks, and choosing a better path.

Why is it Important?

It is tempting to push back when faced with the terms we are discussing. You may be thinking: Yes, those are real problems. But my vacation isn’t like that. I do my best to be a good person. I don’t do that. Recognizing that the way we think about travel is harmful does not mean that we are bad people or tourism is bad. Tourism is deeply important to the economic health of many Indigenous communities. We have talked many times on this blog about how the rise of tourism in Florida was incredibly important to the economic independence of Seminoles . Indigenous tourism is incredibly important, and anti-colonial travel centers those communities and perspectives in a way that benefits the greater community. They key here is being ethical, responsible, and supportive while considering your travel choices.

Talking about things like anti-colonial travel, or decolonizing travel, is less about pointing fingers and more about examining how our travel impacts people. Unless we acknowledge the harm these structures do, we can’t move past them. Even with the best intentions, if we don’t self-examine and recognize harmful practices, we can’t work towards bettering these systems. Moving toward anti-colonial travel requires you to critically think about your impact, and make active choices accordingly. Rethinking how you travel is important simply because how you travel impacts other people. It can harm, or it can uplift. It is our responsibility as travelers to determine what that impact is, and do our best to be responsible.

Ways You Can Decolonize Travel

Educate yourself.

Learn about the history, community, and place you are going to. Who are the original stewards of the land? What issues impact the land and community? Do your research. Support conservation and social justice efforts at home and when you travel. Educate yourself not only about the place you are going to, but also about the community and people it supports.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is

Look at how you financially interact with the communities you are stepping into. Are your tourist dollars going to the right place? Seek out Native businesses, purchase Native art, and support the local community. Think about ways to put money back into the hands of community members or marginalized people. Unfortunately, economic leakage in tourism is an issue. This is when the tourist dollars spent in a destination are not kept within the community, and instead benefit large corporations or outside people. Instead of helping local communities, the money lines the pockets of other people. When spending money, look at where it is going and who it is benefiting. From traveling, to lodging and activities, look at who benefits from your cash.

Seek Out Opportunities to Acknowledge Indigenous Communities

Take what you have learned and put it into practice in the community. Support and seek out Native perspectives. Acknowledge Indigenous people’s sovereign right to inhabit these spaces, cultural practices, and traditional knowledge. Be respectful of the land and the people. Your vacation is not as important as someone’s life, home, and rights. Step beyond commodifying place. Instead, work towards appreciating and uplifting the community.

Remember your Role

It may seem self-explanatory, but remember you are a tourist. This means you are a guest invited into these spaces. It is not your role or right to damage, infringe upon, or take advantage of these places. Minimize your impact on the people, places, and communities you are stepping in to. This also includes the natural environment and outdoors. When you are in nature, leave no trace. Be respectful of cultural practices, and remember that you are being invited into a space that is not yours.

Be Comfortable with “No”

Recognize you have no ownership over the spaces you are visiting. You are a guest. So, become comfortable with the fact that some experiences, cultural knowledge, and places are not for you. You can still enjoy your vacation, but some things are not open for your consumption. Be respectful.

Be an Ally beyond your travels

Ally-ship is something that we have talked briefly about on the blog before. When considering how to change the way you travel, don’t forget to think beyond just your vacation. How can you be an ally to Indigenous communities? Make Indigenous rights and perspectives something you fight for and amplify.

The goal in anti-colonial travel is not immediate perfection. It is a learning process. Use the tips above to look at your own actions. Think critically about how you interact with communities, places, and people. Where are you putting your time, attention, and money? Work towards centering Native voices. Support Native artists and businesses. Respect cultural spaces and perspectives. Your personal choices can impact the way we think about travel.

Florida’s Native American Heritage Trail

1910s-1920s: Tourist Attractions Show Seminole Resilience

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16 Best Things to Do in Colonial Beach, Virginia

This Potomac River town boasts award-winning wines, family-friendly festivals, and a rich presidential history.

Erin Gifford is a travel and outdoor writer based in Virginia with 20+ years of writing and editing experience. She has also written three guidebooks on hiking trails in Virginia. 

Getting Around Town

Where to eat, where to stay.

Once called the “Playground on the Potomac,” Colonial Beach is an eclectic small town that is known for its sandy beaches, osprey, murals, and palm trees. Yes, palm trees, which are donated each spring by locals and visitors alike and are the calling card of Colonial Beach. It’s also the birthplace of two U.S. presidents: George Washington and James Monroe.

This one-time resort town with fewer than 4,000 residents sits quietly on a small peninsula about 35 nautical miles from the Chesapeake Bay, boasting warm sunrise views over the Potomac River and vibrantly colored sunsets across Monroe Bay. To be honest, Colonial Beach is still largely a secret, despite a location that’s just 90 minutes south of Washington, D.C . For those in the know, however, it’s worth visiting and the perfect place to scoop up a weekend cottage and relax for a few days. 

Hop Aboard The Trolley

It’s also a cinch to get around Colonial Beach. Jump onto the free trolley that operates from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends during the summer season, picking up riders hourly at 17 stops across town. Given Colonial Beach is barely 4 miles long, it’s completely walkable, too. 

Grab A Golf Cart

This four-block-wide beach town is also noted for its golf carts. Already have one? You’ll fit right in. No golf cart? No worries. Rent one at T and T Golf Cart Rental or Custom Cartz . Golf carts are so popular here that the town has an Instagram-worthy sculpture right on the beach that features what the town holds in high regard—osprey, oysters, love, the flip-flop lifestyle, and sandy shores—all perched atop a golf cart you can pose in.

Visit George Washington's Birthplace

Situated on Virginia’s Northern Neck, Colonial Beach is steeped in presidential history as the birthplace of both George Washington and James Monroe. The George Washington Birthplace National Monument is perched on 550 acres of the old Popes Creek Plantation, where Washington's family had lived since the 1650s. The national monument features a museum, farm buildings, a Colonial Revival-era garden, and two nature trails .

nps.gov , 1732 Popes Creek Rd., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Explore James Monroe's Childhood Home

Just a five-minute drive from Colonial Beach, the James Monroe Birthplace Park & Museum sits on the former peach and apple orchard plantation where the fifth U.S. president grew up and walks visitors through his life during the Revolution and in politics. If you're not yet tired of presidential history, then drive less than 25 minutes from Colonial Beach to James Madison’s birthplace, Belle Grove Plantation , which is now a bed and breakfast. 

monroefoundation.org , 4460 James Monroe Hwy., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Drink Some Wine

Colonial Beach is also a part of the Chesapeake Bay Wine Trail , which features nine wineries. Both Monroe Bay Winery and Ingleside Vineyards are a short drive from the five different beaches in Colonial Beach. Ingleside Vineyards notably won a coveted gold medal at the 2023 Virginia Governor’s Cup Awards for its 2021 Albariño.   

monroebaywine.com , 4786 James Monroe Hwy., Colonial Beach VA 22443

inglesidevineyards.com , 5872 Leedstown Rd., Oak Grove, VA 22443

Kick Back With A Craft Beer

For craft beers, you’re covered in Colonial Beach, too, thanks to Colonial Beach Brewing and Ice House Brewery, which also has a small marina where you can park your boat. In 2024, Ice House expects to dock tiny houseboats as overnight rentals, too.

cbb.beer , 215C Washington Ave., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

icehousecb.com , 119 Monroe Bay Ave., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Learn About The Town's History

A few doors down from Colonial Beach Brewing is the Museum at Colonial Beach. It’s a tiny three-room museum that’s only open on weekends, but in it, you’ll find well-preserved town artifacts, like newspaper clippings, photographs, and memorabilia. 

themuseumatcolonialbeach.com , 128 Hawthorne St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Take A Walking Tour Around Town

The museum is a good starting point for the town’s self-guided walking tour, which features historic buildings, including a church, inns, a general store, and a schoolhouse. Along the way, you’ll spy a dozen colorful murals that speak to the town’s history and heritage, including seashore scenes that depict Colonial Beach’s early days as a resort town. For retail therapy, pop in the shops on Hawthorn Street, including Beach Paws Boutique and Hawthorne Mercantile.

facebook.com/BeachPawsBoutiqueCBVA , 116 Hawthorn St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

facebook.com/Hawthornmercantile , 116 Hawthorn St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Enjoy A Festival

Colonial Beach is also a festival town, hosting multiple annual events. First launched in 2019, the Virginia Osprey Festival has quickly become a mainstay for the town and visiting birdwatchers each April. A biker's paradise, the Colonial Beach Bike Fest each fall brings 30,000 people to town for a four-day celebration of all things motorcycles.

virginiaospreyfoundation.org , 427 Washington Ave., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

cbbikefest2.com , 215 Irving Ave. North, Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Spend Time By The Water

Of course, no visit to Colonial Beach is complete without a visit to the actual beach. The town has one of the largest shorelines in the state, with over 2 miles of sandy beaches along the Potomac River. Walk along the boardwalk, swim, go sailing or boating, or catch fish on the Colonial Beach Municipal Pier at the Downtown Beach. Or head a little way up to the quieter North Beach.

If you’d rather cruise on the water, head down to the Colonial Beach Yacht Center. You can also fish, hike, bird watch, swim, and more at Westmoreland State Park, which is only about 25 minutes south of town.

facebook.com/CBYCmarina , 1787 Castlewood Dr. Colonial Beach, VA 22443

dcr.virginia.gov , 145 Cliff Rd., Montross, VA 22520

Hang Out On The Dock

For a small town, Colonial Beach offers a surprising variety of seafood restaurants, coffee shops, tiki bars, ice cream shacks, and even Mexican restaurants, including three taco joints in town. Dockside Restaurant & Tiki Bar, which sits at the very tip of the peninsula, is a hands-down favorite, thanks to live music, colorful picnic tables, palm trees, thatched tiki umbrellas, and stunning waterfront sunsets. 

docksidetikibar.com , 1787 Castlewood Dr., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Stuff Yourself With Seafood

Wilkerson’s Seafood Restaurant, which you’ll pass as you drive into town on State Route 205, lures you in with its river views, but the seafood is first-rate, too. Wilkerson’s has been a mainstay in Colonial Beach for more than 75 years. Its all-you-can-eat seafood buffet on weekends draws in the crowds. 

wilkersonsseafoodrestaurant.com , 3900 McKinney Blvd., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Order Some Thai

Also try other spots in town, too, like Orchid Thai, which is a block down from the Municipal Pier. It has soup, salad, fried rice, noodles, curry, dessert, and more menu items. There are also plenty of vegetarian options. Or, visit Sunflower Cuisine, which, interestingly, is heralded for its Thai, sushi, and French cuisine. The menu is divided by each country's cuisine, with appetizer, entrée, and dessert offerings for each.

orchidthaicuisinebeach.com , 19 Hawthorn St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

sunflowercuisine.com , 215 Washington Ave. Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Prep For A Picnic

Also, stop into Circa 1892, which opened in 2023. Named for the year that Colonial Beach was incorporated, Circa 1892 is a gourmet shop that sells wines, cheeses, chocolates, and cigars, as well as artfully crafted charcuterie boards that are perfect for a beach picnic.

circa1892.com , 106 Hawthorn St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Get Retro At The Riverview Inn

When you want to stay the weekend, look to Riverview Inn, a historic 1950s motel that was refurbished to preserve its classic charm. The uniquely cyan-and-crimson retro-style motel is among the most photographed spots in town, especially its large neon sign on the street corner. 

colonialbeachriverview.com , 24 Hawthorne St, Colonial Beach, VA 22443

Try Something Historic And Charming

Colonial Beach is also home to historic inns, like the Colonial Beach Plaza Bed & Breakfast, as well as many comfortable Airbnbs with vacay-worthy names like Anchors Away, Crab Shack, and Sunnyside Up Cottage. 

colonialbeachplaza.com , 21 Weems St., Colonial Beach, VA 22443

George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Popes Creek .

Virginia Wine. Virginia Governor’s Cup Case Winners . Published 2023.

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12 essential food and drink experiences to try in Thailand

Feb 23, 2024 • 7 min read

Known for its aromatic ingredients, piquant flavors and razor-sharp spices, Thai cuisine ranks among the top culinary traditions in the world © AlivePhoto / Shutterstock © Getty Images

Food alone is a worthy reason to visit Thailand . Famous for its inimitable melange of aromatic ingredients, piquant flavors and razor-sharp spices, Thai cuisine ranks among the top culinary traditions in the world.

From street-side stalls peddling wholesome, inexpensive meals to fine-dining establishments plating exquisite delectables on par with the world’s best restaurants, Thai food checks pretty much every box on the gastronomic spec sheet, even for the most demanding and discerning foodies.

While no volume of literature would do justice to the diversity of Thai food, the following are some essential experiences that comprise a rite of passage for food lovers plotting their way around Thailand (or simply passing through the capital Bangkok ).

Read more: Local Bites: the best places to eat and drink in Bangkok

1. dig into pad thai, thailand’s "national dish".

Designed as part of a nation-building exercise in the first half of the 20th century, pad thai ( pàt tai ) was conceptualized to represent Thailand on a plate. A wok-fried dish featuring flat noodles, shrimp, beancurd, bean sprouts, spring onions, peanuts, assorted spices and sauces, pad thai brings together everyday ingredients consumed in Thai households across the country.

It is wildly popular with travelers — especially those acquainting themselves with Thai food for the first time. Don't be surprised if you find yourself gorging on nothing but pad thai through your first 48 hours in Thailand. Many others have done just the same before you.

Where to try it:  Thip Samai  and  Baan Phadthai , Bangkok.

2. Earn your stripes with a pad kra pao lunch

After the initial infatuation with pad thai has worn off, most travelers take a cue from locals and graduate to ordering their first pad kra pao (basil stir fry). This is a simple meal of steamed rice topped with spicy, basil-laced minced meat (chicken, pork or beef) and a fried egg.

Pad kra pao is the definitive working lunch for millions of Thai office-goers looking for a quick and filling fix. The regulation pad kra pao comes loaded with bombastic chilis, so let the chef know well in advance if you prefer it on the mild side.

Where to try it:  Phed Mark , Bangkok. 

3. Master your Thai curries by their colors

The hallowed trinity of Thai curries – the spicy red, the piquant green and the aromatic yellow – is perhaps the most recognizable inclusion on any authentic Thai menu around the world. All three can be prepared with a permutation of meats, seafood or vegetables (the green curry lends itself particularly well to a vegetarian rendition).

After you have sampled all three, round off your curry excursion by tucking into a bowl of massaman , an iconic curry from Southern Thailand featuring potatoes and meat in a star anise-flavored gravy.

Where to try it:  Sanguan Sri ,  Paste  and  Krua Apsorn , all in Bangkok.

4. Explore Northern Thailand’s rustic culinary gems

The food in Northern Thailand is a universe of its own, deriving from the traditions of its resident Indigenous communities. While you're there, sample a bowl of the legendary khao soi (fried noodles in creamy soup), snack non-stop on sai oua (spicy pork sausage) and tuck into impossibly flavorful gaeng hung lay (tender pork belly simmered in aromatic red curry).

Where to try it:   Kiti Panit , Khao Soi Khun Yai and  Khao Soi Mae Sai in Chiang Mai . 

5. Sample Southern Thailand’s seafood delicacies

In the quaint urban grid of Phuket Town are a bunch of culinary institutions showcasing the best marine delicacies of Thailand’s ocean-hemmed south, prepared according to the region’s signature recipes.

Served with rice-noodle rolls, crabmeat in yellow curry is a must-try, as are deep-fried whiting flavored with turmeric and the many versions of fried grouper, bass and snapper, served with an assortment of sauces.

Where to try it:  Raya ,  One Chun  and  Tu Kab Khao , all in Phuket.

  6. Raise a late-night toast at a Bangkok rooftop bar

Rooftop watering holes are synonymous with Bangkok’s nightlife. There’s no dearth of options when it comes to choosing a stylish bar situated on a terrace overlooking the city’s skyline, where the cocktails are stiff and delicious, the house beer is chilled to a crisp and the company is cheerful and irreverent.

Many have a smart-casual dress code so make sure you don't turn up in a T-shirt, shorts or flip-flops.

Where to try it:  Above 11 ,  Moon Bar  and Octave , all in Bangkok. 

7. Splurge on a high-end Bangkok dinner

Home to some of the world’s most renowned contemporary chefs, Bangkok is a fine-dining wonderland , where a jaw-dropping number of haute cuisine kitchens jostle for position on best-of lists year after year.

While a single meal at any of these perpetually booked-out places can easily make your wallet lighter by several hundred dollars, the intangible experience of being served by the best names in the business is priceless.

Where to try it:  Gaggan Anand ,  Sühring  and  Sorn , Bangkok. 

8. Enjoy a riverside dinner on the Chao Phraya

If you are a romantic who values ambience as much as food, book yourself a dinner table at a riverside restaurant on the banks of the Chao Phraya. Enjoy a memorable meal while gazing out onto the dark waters of Bangkok’s principal waterway, beaming with a magical glow cast by city lights as it snakes its way through the metropolis. You could also book yourself a dinner cruise, allowing you to savor the electric atmosphere from a boat cruising the placid waters. It’s a quintessential experience without which no culinary adventure in Thailand is complete.

Most restaurants and cruises get booked out days in advance, so grab your spot well ahead of your date.

Where to try it:  Chakrabongse Villas ,  Steve’s Café & Cuisine  and  Asiatique , Bangkok. 

9. Lap up a sweet serving of mango sticky rice

A simple but thoroughly enjoyable serving of sticky jasmine rice, sliced ripe mango, crisp-fried lentils and coconut cream, this balmy dessert provides the perfect balance to close out a spicy Thai meal.

Practical tip for vegetarians with a sweet tooth: this dish makes for a fantastic meal option if you find yourself in a Thai restaurant with a meat-only menu.

Where to try it:  Ban Khun Mae  and  Eathai , both in Bangkok. 

10. Vegetarians and vegans, head to Bangkok

In spite of its robust meat-and-seafood reputation, Thailand’s capital boasts an enduring vegetarian and vegan food culture. To let people know "I’m vegetarian" in Thai you'll need to master " pŏm gin jair"  (for men) or " dì chăn gin jair" (for women).

A selection of stylish Bangkok vegan eateries whip up refreshingly creative meals suitable for global palates and healthy lifestyles, while a formidable line of Indian restaurants belts out iconic vegetarian dishes. The annual Vegetarian Festival – a nine-day celebration of plant-based food, usually held in September or October – is a great time to be in the city  as Chinatown comes alive with innumerable street stalls selling a mind-boggling variety of vegetarian delights.

Where to try it:  Veganerie ,  Bonita Cafe & Social Club  and  Saravana Bhavan , all in Bangkok. 

11. Crunch into the local insect specialties

While the eco-foodies from some parts of the world have begun championing insects as an excellent source of environmentally friendly protein, these creatures have been part of the menu in Southeast Asia for centuries. Normally served with soy sauce and pepper, bamboo worms (rót dòo an) are an excellent beer snack and a good introduction to bug dining. Fried grasshoppers (tak kâ tan)  and crickets (jîng reed)  are also a popular crunchy beer snack: remove the wings and legs before consuming. Silkworms ( nhon măi) are soft and mushy in the center and are normally fried with kaffir-lime leaves. Often used in salads and omelets, red ant eggs (kài mot daeng) are white in color with a sour, lemony flavor for a taste contrast.

12. But wait, there's so much more to try... 

A few more must-try dishes before you leave Thailand include:

Larb: Salad of boiled minced meat (chicken, pork or beef), seasoned with lime juice, crushed rice powder, fish sauce, chili, onion, lemongrass and mint.

Pad see ew: Stir-fried soy-glazed flat noodles with leafy greens, featuring beef, seafood or tofu.

Kor moo yang: Slices of charcoal-grilled pork shoulder, served with spicy sauce.

Seafood spaghetti: A unique Thai concoction of stir-fried spaghetti and assorted seafood in a super-spicy pepper sauce, flavored with kaffir lime leaves. 

Thai coffee: Locally grown organic coffee – particularly from the Chiang Rai highlands – has a loyal fan base across Thailand. You’ll find innumerable cafes in the country’s urban centers serving the beverage in a plethora of different brewing styles and traditions.

This article was first published Nov 20, 2012 and updated Feb 23, 2024.

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