This book considers the British travelling beyond their isles over the last three hundred years, and through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives reflects on their taste for discovery and self-discovery both through the exploration – and exploitation – of other lands and peoples.

This is a collection of twelve interdisciplinary essays from international scholars concerned with examining the British experience of Empire since the eighteenth century. It considers themes such as national identity, modernity, culture, social class, diplomacy, consumerism, gender, postcolonialism, and perceptions of Britain's place in the world.

This volume covers a broad range of everyday private and public, touristic, commercial and fictional encounters between Britons and continental Europeans, in a variety of situations and places: moments that led to a meaningful exchange of opinions, practices, or concepts such as friendship or politeness. It argues that, taken together, travel accounts, commercial advice, letters, novels and philosophical works of the long eighteenth century, reveal the growing impact of British sociability on the sociable practices on the continent, and correspondingly, the convivial turn of the Enlightenment. In particular, the essays collected here discuss the ways and means – in conversations, through travel guides or literary works – by which readers and writers grappled with their cultural differences in the field of sociability. The first part deals with travellers, the second section with the spreading of various cultural practices, and the third with fictional encounters in philosophical dialogues and novels.

Post-disaster and post-conflict tourism has recently emerged as a prominent topic of research and considers new risks that jeopardize tourism travel to destinations that have recently experienced climate-related disasters, civil conflicts, and other challenges. This volume presents a host of innovative strategies that could be adopted by post-colonial, post-conflict, and post-disaster destinations to encourage travel and tourism in these areas. Policymakers are focusing their efforts on identifying and eradicating external and/or internal risks in order to protect the tourism industry in their regions, in line with a new spirit that is clearly orientated toward mitigating risks. This capacity of adaptation suggests two important things that are at the heart of this book. On the one hand, tourism serves as a resilient mechanism that is helping destinations in their recovery strategy. On another hand, this raises ethical issues related to tourism consumption.

Travel in early modern Europe is frequently represented as synonymous with the institution of the Grand Tour, a journey undertaken by elite young males from northern Europe to the centres of the arts and antiquity in Italy. Taking a somewhat different perspective, this volume builds upon recent research that pushes beyond this narrow orthodoxy and which decentres Italy as the ultimate destination of European travellers. Instead, it explores a much broader pattern of travel, undertaken by people of varied backgrounds and with divergent motives for travelling. By tapping into current reactions against the reification of the Grand Tour as a unique and distinctive practice, this volume represents an important contribution to the ongoing process of resituating the Grand Tour as part of a wider context of travel and topographicalmwriting. Focusing upon practices of travel in northern and western Europe rather than in Italy, particularly in Britain, the Low Countries and Germany, the essays in this collection highlight how itineraries continually evolved in response to changing political, economic and intellectual contexts. In so doing, the reasons for travel in northern Europe are subjected to a similar level of detailed analysis as has previously only been directed on Italy. By doing this, the volume demonstrates the variety of travel experiences, including the many shorter journeys made for pleasure, health, education and business undertaken by travellers of varying age and background across the period. In this way the volume brings to the fore the experiences of varied categories of traveller – from children to businessmen – which have traditionally been largely invisible in the historiography of travel.

The 1950s and 1960s were a transformative period in Britain, and an important part of this was how Britons’ lives were changed when they began flying abroad for their holidays. In A World Away Michael John Law investigates how something that previously only the rich could afford became available to working-class holidaymakers. A World Away moves beyond the big players in the tourist industry and technical accounts of the airplanes used by tour operators to tell the histories of the people who were there, both tourists and tour guides, using their personal testimonies. Until now there has been uncertainty about the identity of these new tourists: some feared they were working-class intruders who might invade the pristine destinations favoured by the elite; others claimed that most were from the middle class. Using new data derived from flight accident investigations, Law explains the complex origins of these new flyers. In British society this unprecedented mobility could not go unpunished, and the new tourists were lampooned in books and newspapers aimed at the middle classes. Law shows how popular culture, movies, and music influenced the decision to travel, and what actually happened when these new holidaymakers went abroad. Law investigates the package tour industry from its mid-century origins through its inherent weaknesses, governmental interference, and unforeseen world events that contributed to its partial failure in the early 1970s. A World Away provides the definitive account of this important change in postwar British society.

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

This new volume, Post-Disaster and Post-Conflict Tourism, now going into its 2nd edition, takes an in-depth look at how global geopolitical tensions and global threats affect the tourism industry and offers tools and strategies for meeting these challenges. The book is updated with chapters that include new research, studies, and experiences, many of which consider the fall-out from the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism. It also includes five brand new chapters, for over 50 new pages of text. With chapters by well-versed scholars who have worked as experts in post-disaster and post-conflict tourism, the book presents a host of case scenarios along with innovative strategies that can be implemented by postcolonial, post-conflict, and post-disaster destinations to encourage travel and tourism in these areas. Topics include using tourism as a vehicle for economic recovery, educating tourists at the pre-visit stage, developing and employing postcolonial branding and self-branding, using sports tourism and food events as a marketing strategy, the ethics revolving around post-disaster consumption, and much more. The new chapters discuss tourism in the age of the coronavirus pandemic and its dramatic disruptive effect on the tourism industry. The authors delve into post-COVID tourism marketing, health and wellness education and practices, ethical considerations for tourism operators, and more. A chapter also considers the challenges of sustainable supply chain management in tour operations. With contributions from experts in this emerging field, this volume is a rich resource for travel and tourism professionals, policymakers, researchers, and others. It creates a bridge between the conceptual discussions around "dark consumption" (tourism directed to places that are identified with death and suffering) and the urgency to develop empirical models that support destination marketing organizations in a rapidly changing world.

The British Royal Navy of the French Wars (1793–1815) is an enduring national symbol, but we often overlook the tens of thousands of foreign seamen who contributed to its operations. Foreign Jack Tars presents the first in-depth study of their employment in the Navy during this crucial period. Based on sources from across Britain, Europe, and the US, and blending quantitative, social, cultural, economic, and legal history, it challenges the very notions of 'Britishness' and 'foreignness'. The need for manpower during wartime meant that naval recruitment regularly bypassed cultural prejudice, and even legal status. Temporarily outstripped by practical considerations, these categories thus revealed their artificiality. The Navy was not simply an employer in the British maritime market, but a nodal point of global mobility. Exposing the inescapable transnational dimensions of a quintessentially national institution, the book highlights the instability of national boundaries, and the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states.

Correspondence, travel writing, diary writing, painting, scrapbooking, curating, collecting and house interiors allowed British women scope to express their responses to imperial sites and experiences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Taking these productions as its archive, British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775-1930 includes a collection of essays from different disciplines that consider the role of British women's cultural practices and productions in conceptualising empire. While such productions have started to receive greater scholarly attention, this volume uses a more self-conscious lens of gender to question whether female cultural work demonstrates that colonial women engaged with the spaces and places of empire in distinctive ways. By working across disciplines, centuries and different colonial geographies, the volume makes an exciting and important contribution to the field by demonstrating the diverse ways in which European women shaped constructions of empire in the modern period.