Nowadays, tourism is one of the biggest sectors in the global economy. For the year 2013, for example, the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimates, that international tourism receipts reached US 59 billion worldwide. In the same year, more than one billion tourists travelled abroad, 563 millions of whom chose Europe as their destination.
Our workshop contends that regional case studies are a prerequisite for understanding the transformative power that this global phenomenon has exerted over the last two hundred years– with developments accelerating in marked fashion in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Involving scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and adopting a comparative approach, the workshop’s aim is to identify and trace tourism-induced regional transformation processes from the ‘proto-tourism’ of the early modern period to the present day. Applying a long term perspective will not only enable us to identify transformation processes, but also to analyze critical periods and turning points in tourism history. Workshop presentations will focus on the manifold, densely intertwined dimensions of regional transformation processes. This applies to economic and social change as well as to the cultural dimension and – especially – questions of socio-ecological interrelations and societal sustainability. Regional history in dialogue with neighboring disciplines offers a particularly appropriate analytical framework for this task.
Through the proposed workshop we aim to enable a broad discussion based on a variety of diverse case studies, while also taking stock of the current state of research into European Tourism History.
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