Introduction

Although the antecedents of modern tourism can be traced back to Thomas Cook in 1850s Britain (Hamilton, 2006; Withey, 1998), as a highly structured sector of many economies it can be viewed as a creation of more recent times. Its rise has been traced by a number of authors, including Gee et al. (1997) and Holloway and Taylor (2006). Since the early 1950s the growth of tourism, both domestically in the developed countries and internationally, has been phenomenal in its scale, and remarkably resilient to periodic economic and political adversity. In product life cycle terms (Evans et al., 2003: 138–141) and taking a global perspective, international tourism might be categorized as having passed through the “introductory” phase ...