Empire, Tourism, and Colonial Knowledge

This book is due to be published September 2025, now available on backorder

This book provides a fresh reinterpretation of the global spread of modern leisure travel in the middle of the nineteenth century through a critical comparative reading of twenty-two works of popular travel writing from maritime Southeast Asia and Ceylon.

The examination of these books reveals a coherent genre that was seemingly frivolous yet in fact intensely political, with shared rules and tropes that served to legitimise colonial rule and codify aspects of colonial culture in the popular metropolitan imagination. On the ground in Asia, the emergent practices and preferences of this new proto-tourism reinforced and played off contemporary processes of colonisation. The analysis employs a novel transimperial framework, analysing Dutch and British travellers and their journeys in the Dutch and British colonies of the region, revealing the importance of colonial proto-tourism in creating an encompassing culture of empire that traversed national and colonial boundaries.

Mikko Toivanen is a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, specialising in global and colonial history. His work deals with the Dutch and British empires in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia and the global cultures of imperialism, with a current focus on developing ideas of urbanity and the changing uses of public space in colonial contexts. His wider research interests include the global circulations of colonial knowledge and the history of Nordic colonial entanglements.