‘Tourism was an affluent privilege — it's now becoming a working-class right'

Time of India

22-06-2025

Sasha D Pack
Sasha D. Pack is Professor of History at the
University of Buffalo
. Speaking to
Srijana Mitra Das
at Times Evoke , he discusses how — and why — we travel:
When did travel change from being largely pilgrimages to pleasure trips?
Modern tourism has multiple origins — pilgrimage may be among the most important. But tourism as a phenomenon grew with the Industrial Revolution and the 18th-century culture of romanticism. A notion spread that the landscape was changing rapidly.
Cities were expanding, and factories were beginning to dot the countryside. As industrialism grew, the word 'tourism' itself spread — there was a yearning to see what was authentic before it disappeared or contemplate the sublime infinity of mountains and seas.
A good definition of 'modernity' is that this is a condition where people feel things are always changing — they're in a state of constant unsettlement. Tourism becomes one way to participate in that spectacle of unsettlement. Importantly, pilgrimage itself was, or is, about a transcendence, changing oneself through travel, that remains part of modern tourism. Of course, with the Industrial Revolution, cities also grew crowded — some, especially in the 19th century, saw cholera and tuberculosis outbreaks. So, there was an emphasis on hydrotherapy, sunlight and milder temperatures that drove people to travel. Ironically, some destinations they chose were earlier considered places of disease — the
Mediterranean
coast, for instance, was once thought to be somewhere you could get malaria. But those landscapes were transformed into places now considered healthy, therapeutic escapes from unpleasant modern industrial life.
You've written of post-1945 tourism — what were some surprising research findings?
The most surprising was how all the forms of tourism we know today, whether it's going to the beach, visiting museums or even ecotourism, have a very deep history — they all existed well before 1945. Post-WWII, tourism became organised like never before — it almost became a right rather than a privilege of the well-to-do.
Affluent people always took holidays but after 1945, members of the working class also aspired to have this kind of escape from everyday life.
That was organised to a great extent by governments and intergovernmental organisations like the European Union and the
International Monetary Fund
. An interesting example is how, in the late 1940s, Great Britain was facing a serious currency crisis with the pound sterling rapidly devaluing.
One way the government convinced other countries to hold more pound sterling in their reserves and bolster its value, thus, was by restricting British tourist visits. They essentially offered, 'Well, we'll permit, say, 50,000 British tourists to visit France if France agrees to hold this much of our currency in reserve'.
This was the first time tourism became an object of international negotiation — after WWII, it grew far more into an element of governmental attention.
What have been some of tourism's ecological impacts?
Like most modern economic endeavours, tourism has a major environmental impact — some studies put transportation alone as accounting for 13% of global carbon emissions. In developed economies, where more travel has occurred over the past, one-third of carbon emissions are estimated to come from transport, which includes tourism.
There are other major impacts too — hotels entail constant lighting, huge water use, deploying new linens daily, discarding half-used products, wasting food and doing things we ordinarily don't do at home. Another extremely important impact is altered land use — when you make sprawling coastal resorts or mountain hotels, you are disrupting ecosystems in ways we can't even entirely comprehend.
What links tourism and labour?
Consider 'The Riviera, Exposed' by Stephen L. Harp, an excellent book about this cherished destination, visited since the 1800s by aristocrats and the well-to-do. After World War II, there was a desire to bring it to the masses, with a 'high volume-lower cost' model becoming profitable. To adapt, though, the
Riviera
needed more hotels, infrastructure, water systems, etc. Most of the labour recruited to build all this came from North Africa, particularly Algeria, while it was still a French territory. This was often presented as a reason why Algerians should stay in the French sphere, with all these labour opportunities for them.
But Algeria gained independence in 1962, and many of these workers were then no longer considered French and given no rights. The very areas they had helped build became the birthplace of the
National Front
(now, the
National Rally
) and French anti-immigrant parties. And there was a concerted effort to conceal these people, not let them establish any kind of permanent residence, herding them into camps while they were still beautifying this tourist destination.
They were prevented from living in the cities where they worked, forced into shanties and when the work was finished, made to move on. This also happened in the United States, where so much infrastructure, particularly in the south that attracts a lot of tourism, was built by labour which came from Mexico, the
Caribbean
and
South America
. When you visit, you might imagine these things, being so gleaming and pristine, were always there, but we should recognise that the effort behind it was gruelling and often came from immigrant labour.
As more people document their voyages on social media now, what does it mean to be a tourist today?
Travel is a very important part of what makes us who we are — it is central to the human experience. People documenting their journeys on social media may look like a new occurrence but travel literature actually has a long pedigree. Earlier, people wrote about their pilgrimages or adventures in exotic countries in books that others read because this appealed to a desire. Such social media has a deep tradition. Obviously, it allows new bells and whistles but it retains the central point that it is deeply human to travel.
Humans always journeyed — the agricultural revolution of the last 10,000 years makes us assume our natural state is sedentary and it is exceptional to travel. But we developed fire before agriculture — that allowed us to travel safely, keeping away predators and creating comfort.
Neanderthals were as smart as us with similar tools and technologies — but they didn't travel. They are rarely found far from their ancestral homes while Homo sapiens had this uncanny ability to sustain the challenges of travel — those aren't just technical, related to safety and sustenance, but also the establishment of trust or durable emotional connections with people. This is how cultures developed their traditions of hospitality, deciding if they'd be welcoming or hostile to outsiders.
If we stop travelling, we will lose an important part of who we have evolved to be, travel was a huge part of different civilisations from ancient Greece to China, many thinkers debating if it was alright to travel just to sightsee or if that was an extravagant impertinence. Many ancient travellers then decided curiosity was something that needed to be satisfied.
Today, too, when we see places or meet people and other beings on our holidays, we are participating in something central to the human experience — and in this age of burgeoning artificial intelligence, it's increasingly important to remember what it is that sets us apart.