Trade and the Environment: Law, Economics, and Policy Book

This is a delightful little book - written with grace and charm, and with a nice balance between historical detail and imaginative illustration. The title suggests that the book is written as a survey spanning from Roman times to the present day, but the actual chronology is rather more schematic. It consists of nine chapters, each focused on a particular time and particular type of tourist: (1) The Imperial Roman; (2) The Medieval Pilgrim; (3) The Elizabethan; (4) The Grand Tourist; (5) The Romantic; (6) The Victorian; (7) The Belle Epoque Sojourner; (8) The Tourist Explosion; (9) The Post-Tourist.

Feifer writes in her introduction that her story focuses on the experiences of the "Anglo-Saxon" tourist, or rather one might say the English-speaking tourist: those cut from the same cloth as the majority of this book's readership. In each of the nine chapters, she draws source material from well known or oft-read travelers who (in her view at least) epitomized the type she intends to analyze. By such means, she is able to sketch a light and readable (if somewhat simplistic) history of tourism over the centuries without assaulting the reader with too much boring detail. It is, of course, really a popular history of tourism, not a scholarly work, although the book seems to be well researched.

I did feel at times that her descriptions of "tourism" in the past were a bit forced, especially for the earlier sections on Roman and medieval times, and even perhaps on a few of the other periods she discusses. To put this another way, she writes as if, say, a Roman traveler fit exactly in the mold of our modern conception of the tourist; and as if the medieval religious pilgrimage was nothing if not an early form of tourism. Such parallels between distant past and the present phenomenon of commercialized tourism are probably a bit of a stretch. But she does offer some interested evidence to substantiate these descriptions, and it is interesting as an intellectual exercise to imagine these ancient forms of travel as "tourism." Perhaps that is the principal contribution.

I do not know what kind of success this book achieved when it was published in 1985 (quite good success, judging by the abundance of cheap copies on Amazon), but I think it deserves a lot of credit as a casual and readable introduction to the history of tourism. Pick up a copy before your next trip!