Chapter
SEVEN
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHEN I HAD JUST MOVED TO NEW York, my mother called me up and told me that she had found a couple of broke European tourists who were having trouble figuring out how to change their traveler’s checks. They were standing at a bank counter trying to sort out all the paperwork. My mother helped them fill out the forms in triplicate and photocopy their passports. When she understood how little money they had, she invited them home for lunch. After feeding them, she asked, per ancient Indian custom, if they would like to take an afternoon nap. When they woke up from their naps, she served them coffee and snacks. Then she sent them on their way with advice and banana chips. “Your father was very annoyed about it all,” she told me, “but I thought, my own children are in other countries. I hope someone helps them when they need help.” My mother is the kind stranger that other mothers hope their children will find when they travel abroad. Whenever I encounter any good fortune on my own travels, I think of my mother and how she eased the road for those two hapless travelers.
If my father hated travel, my mother could not get enough of it. She enjoys new places, new people, new things to do. It is entirely possible that my parents were only slightly different from each other in their travel preferences when they began their marriage as impressionable twentysomethings. But marriages have a way of exacerbating polarities, with the two selves constructing themselves against each other. And so whether it was my mother resisting my father’s crustiness or whether it was my father scaling back against my mother’s enthusiasm, their polarities shaped my own childhood.
It was my mother who took our family traveling. Most of her meager salary went toward rent and school fees. But one of the benefits of my mother’s job in a government bank was that her employer paid for employees to visit their hometowns. Local employees, like my mother, used this benefit for touristic travel. So every few years, our family, armed with canisters of drinking water and pickles and podis to add zest to railway meals, boarded a train at Ernakulam Railway Station. We visited Delhi, Agra, Bangalore, Madras, Bombay, sleeping overnight in trains, making friends out of fellow passengers, eating fabulous unrepeatable meals I can only dream of now as multiple families shared their tiffin boxes and passed around pickle jars.
A long-distance train snaking across a vast continent: this will forever be my utopian ideal of a journey, thanks to my mother. Even my anti-travel father gets a little misty-eyed when we talk about those train journeys that he was forced to go on. I learned the geography of India through the foods that vendors thrust through our windows in the frantic minutes that the train stopped at railway stations along the way: banana fritters at Palakkad, curd rice in Coimbatore, fresh juice at the massive Vijayawada station where we also refilled our water, baskets of oranges in Nagpur that someone had to be deputed to stay up for since the trains from Kerala arrived at Nagpur at midnight, cool sweet white pedas at Mathura and the shock with which I found out they were made of ash gourd, the high-pitched wail of the cucumber vendor as he walked through the train with his shaker of mixed spice powders to dress the thick cool strips of cucumbers we longed for when the train fans stopped working, and samosas with a side of fiery green chilies that announced firmly that the train had now entered the strange and unpredictable territories known to us South Indians as North India.
It was on the train that I first began obsessing over exactly when the present and the past collide. Did the place that you just saw out of the window belong to the past? What if you just walked back to a train car that was reaching that place just then? Did that count as time travel? How strange that the present in which you were thinking about the past had suddenly become past. Sometimes at a bend in the rails, I would see the awe-inspiring sight of the length of the train on both sides, curving gently. What I had thought of as a straight line was much more twisted. What did this mean for time?
Often, the train would pause for hours in the middle of a lush valley or on a dry plain surrounded by brush for hundreds of kilometers. Sometimes we would make an unscheduled stop at some tiny railway station, waiting for a train from the opposite direction to pass us. Sometimes someone would pull the chain, grinding the train to a halt; once it was a woman who panicked that someone had cut her gold chain off her neck while she was sleeping; it turned out she had forgotten that she took it off and secreted it in a suitcase before her nap. Sometimes, especially during the monsoons, the train would move very cautiously through waterlogged valleys lest a sudden movement set off a landslide. My point is, time became elastic during those train journeys. None of us expected to reach wherever we were going on time.
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Time was the first of many things I found suspicious about Around the World in Eighty Days. The Jules Verne novel, published in 1872, starts off with Phileas Fogg wagering twenty thousand pounds with his friends at the Reform Club in London that he would be able to circumnavigate the world in less than three months. Fogg, an independently wealthy British gentleman, is confident that he will be able to traverse the entire world and return to the club in exactly eighty days. Off he goes with his French valet, Jean Passepartout, on an adventure that takes him from England to France to Italy to Egypt to India to Hong Kong to Japan to the United States and back to London. The novel is the third in a series of adventure travel fiction by Jules Verne, all of them inspired by the immense technological advances that were occurring in the nineteenth century.
As a child reading this book, I was mesmerized by the names of places that Fogg travels to. But I counted them and it just didn’t make sense that this itinerary of eight or nine different places, barely touching Africa, completely ignoring South America and Australia, could be considered travel around the world. As I grew up, I kept returning to the book with more questions. For instance, how did Phileas Fogg make his money? Right at the beginning, Verne makes a point of how no one knows where Fogg’s wealth came from. He has no need for anything as undignified as work; he has never been seen at the exchange or at the bank or in the city or in any of the courts; he was not a manufacturer or a trader or a merchant or a gentleman farmer. Unlike Jane Austen, who tells us exactly how many pounds a year her characters live on and where it comes from, Verne shrugs and informs us that Fogg’s wealth just is.
But he is English and this is not a coincidence: the English were the most assertive travelers at the beginning of the modern era. “Ours is a nation of travelers,” the British poet Samuel Rogers wrote in 1830. Or as Lawrence Osborne puts it in his 2006 book The Naked Tourist, the British were the ugly Americans of the eighteenth century.
Where did this British fervor to see the world come from? Prior to the Industrial Revolution, travel was a luxury. The Grand Tour is a famous example. But starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, the rise of manufacturing wealth also created a new class of consumers in Britain.
It wasn’t just that the Industrial Revolution made tourism possible; it also made it necessary. Everyday life during the Industrial Revolution was filled with oppressive indignities and unheard-of comforts. Eric Zuelow writes in A History of Modern Tourism of how pollution and overcrowding became normal as whole new cities mushroomed almost overnight and people flooded into these growing urban centers. Trash was everywhere. Coal smoke poured out of the factories as well as the overcrowded housing. There was no running water until the second half of the nineteenth century. As everyday life became more miserable while technology and buying power advanced, a vacation in the mountains or at the beach slowly became possible and necessary for more and more people.
“Before the mid-eighteenth century, people simply did not go into the mountains if they could help it,” Zuelow writes. According to travel historians, it was the German Romantics, closely followed by the English, who first took to the mountains. Perhaps the picture that represents this moment best is Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), in which we see, from the back, a man in a green coat standing atop a craggy rock, looking into a misty valley. He is alone. He is thinking. He is on a mountain. The man personifies this very eighteenth-century Western European yearning to get away and climb the mountains. A word was invented to express this desire by compounding the German words wandern (hike) and lust (desire): wanderlust.
“Two weeks before the end of the [eighteenth] century, a brother and sister went walking across the snow,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. The brother is William and the sister is Dorothy. The Wordsworth siblings were walking across the Pennine mountains of northern England over the course of four days to their new home in Grasmere, Lake District. Solnit relates what an extraordinary act this was—walking, not out of necessity, but as an aesthetic experience. Soon the British middle class, flush with wealth from industrialization and eager for a respite from the dizzying rate of urbanization, followed Wordsworth and other Romantics into the mountains. Alpine mountaineering would go on to become one of the first sites of modern tourist activity. Climbing clubs started erupting around Europe, with the first one established in London in 1857. As tourism took off, wanderlust evolved and came to mean the desire to travel, not just in the mountains and not simply by walking. There is a bread-crumb trail leading from the eighteenth century’s search for the sublime in the mountains to the popularity of #wanderlust on Instagram today.
The beach was the other space that transformed into a recreational site over the course of the eighteenth century. According to beach historians—yes, this is a real job—the medievals did not have much use for oceans. The seas were nasty and dangerous, associated with seasickness, monsters, and mythical disasters. The beach was where invasions began and soldiers departed for war. But in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, beaches acquired an aspirational gloss. After George III was prescribed sea dipping as a cure for his porphyria in 1789, sea bathing became popular among the upper classes, and a sea-bathing machine was invented to enable the upper classes, especially women, to enter the waters without being gawked at. The machines were like mobile chariots that could be wheeled into the ocean, allowing the person inside an opportunity to dip into the water while preserving their modesty.
I first came across sea-bathing machines in Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, a sharply vivid portrait of a Victorian seaside town in the frenzy of becoming a beach destination. Austen started writing this novel in the early nineteenth century. By the second half of the nineteenth century, beach culture was in full swing. Here’s some firsthand testimony from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865: “Alice had been to the seaside once in her life and had come to the general conclusion that, wherever you go to on the English coast, you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.”
I have often thought that going to the beach is just not worth everything I have to lug there. Blanket, sunscreen, snacks, books, swimsuit, towel, drinking water, sun hats, friends . . . But the sea-bathing machine makes this list look like nothing. It involved an umbrella, a box, sometimes a horse to pull the machine or a complex rope-and-pulley system. And servants who were required to run this contraption and hand around sandwiches afterward.
Consider the sandwich, supposedly invented in 1762, just in time for those mountain hikes and beach picnics. Its creation is credited to John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who asked for a meal that could be eaten one-handed during a gambling binge. Based on my reading of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves books, I am going to assume that the earl had nothing to do with the actual making; it was his cook or some other minion who put the meat between the two pieces of bread. But even before we arrive at that fateful gambling binge, chances are that the earl and his cook were inspired by his travels in the Mediterranean, where mezze platters featured bread wrapped around dips and cheeses and meats. In Sandwich: A Global History, Bee Wilson writes of how sandwiches had existed for thousands of years before the Earl of Sandwich ate them, whether in French peasant food or Jewish Passover meals. In other words, an English aristocrat is credited with inventing the sandwich when, in reality, what he did was make it popular in a place where he had the cultural capital to have it named after him.
Often while reading the history of tourism, I wonder how much of it is a colonial knowledge sandwich. Were the beaches in the Pacific taboo to the coastal people who lived there, in the same way that European beaches were taboo in the Middle Ages? We know now that it was the Polynesians who taught the world the art of surfing—Joseph Banks, the naturalist aboard the Cook expedition, describes how Tahitian swimmers would ride the waves using the stem of an old canoe. Did no one really go walking in the mountains till Wordsworth did? After all, mountains around the world are home to Indigenous communities whose stories have been excluded and dismissed from mainstream histories for generations, from the Lakota on the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Samburu and Maasai people who live on Mount Nyiru in Kenya. In Wild, Jay Griffiths writes about how Indigenous communities speak of the mountains they live on with reverence and affection, whereas mountaineering literature is full of the vocabulary of war, military might, imperialism, nationalism, and masculinity. Men were always “conquering” mountains or “laying siege to them,” she points out, quoting writer after writer, from Ronald William Clark, who wrote of beating the alpine summit into submission, to H. B. George, who wrote that the desire “to explore the Earth and subdue it” had “made England the great colonizer of the world.” Compared to that, Griffiths says, many Indigenous traditions view the mountains as female, a mothering deity.
My friend Janelle Trees, a traveling doctor who worked for years in the central Australian desert, often spoke wearily about the climbers who come to Uluru, the sacred rock of the Pitjantjatjara community who live around Uluru. Uluru is part of the traditional rituals of the Pitjantjatjara, who consider themselves the custodians of the rock. Janelle calls Uluru “one of the most frequently and profoundly misunderstood places on a hundred thousand bucket lists.” Uluru was pseudiscovered in 1873 by William Gosse, who named it after an Australian politician, Henry Ayers. The colonial Australian government promoted Ayers Rock as a tourist destination in the same way that the United States has used tourism to take away Indigenous lands and turn them into national parks. Uluru soon became one of those unfortunate places that millions of travelers around the world were told is a must-see-before-you-die. In direct opposition to the wishes of the Pitjantjatjara, these tourists insisted on climbing Uluru. As a doctor in the tiny desert clinic that was meant primarily for serving the local Aboriginal community, Janelle and her staff of three nurses often found themselves catering instead to climbers who had to be rescued after they lost their way among the clefts within Uluru or fell into a rock hole or developed extreme heat stroke. In 2019, after decades of advocacy by Australian Aboriginal activists, the Australian government finally banned the climbing of Uluru.
Even the tallest peak in the world is not immune from tragedies brought on by the self-aggrandizement of tourism. In May 2019, Mount Everest witnessed one of its deadliest seasons, with eleven climbers freezing to death as they crowded on the tiny summit, 8,850 meters above sea level. The New York Times interviewed a man who survived that climb: he had to step around the corpse of a woman who had not.
The photo the Times published alongside this article—a long line of climbers in brightly colored snow gear against an expanse of white mountain—popped into my head when I read the very first page of Fallen Giants, Stewart Weaver and Maurice Isserman’s 2008 book on the history of mountaineering in the Himalayas. “Mountain climbing is a sport without spectators and, particularly in the Himalaya, the climbers are almost always the only ones on the scene to witness and record their triumphs and tragedies,” the authors wrote. This is no longer true. Two years after that sentence was published, Apple introduced the iPhone 4, with its front-facing camera. Since then, the selfie has become ritualized into tourism, and mountaineering, too, has become a sport in self-spectatorship. During climbing season, it is now de rigueur to wait in a long line to take a selfie at the very top.
While mountaineering was turning into a popular Western pastime in nineteenth-century Europe, the British were establishing “hill stations” all over India. In Shimla, Darjeeling, Mussorie, Ooty, the formula was the same: roads were cleared, bungalows were built, clock towers and fountains and statues popped up, and boarding schools for European children mushroomed. The hill stations were a reprieve from the hard work of colonizing, so they were built to simulate a home away from home. This is the root of the morphological resemblance between Indian hill stations and nineteenth-century English villages. While writers such as Rudyard Kipling tended to paint the hill stations as quixotic places, far removed from the brutality of colonialism, in reality, as Dane Kennedy writes in The Magic Mountains, “these places were profoundly engaged in the complex refractory processes of colonialism.”
I had to pause and sit with my confusion when I first read this. I love the hill stations of India, their quaint little rituals and the eye-cooling vistas offered by the lines of their gardens. And yet so many of these rituals and vistas—the club libraries that will not let any adult male enter unless he is wearing shoes, the assembly lines in which tea plantations are laid out, the magnificent veranda views from the plantation houses that ensure optimum surveillance of workers—are grounded in the colonial politics of exclusion and exploitation. The more we dig into the history of modern tourism, the more the pickax hits its underground cable connection with colonialism.
When I read that the first Alpine Club was established in London in 1857, the date rang a bell. The year marked the Indian Rebellion of 1857, also referred to as the Sepoy Mutiny in British history. The coincidence is a reminder that the furious pace at which tourism was developing in Europe was taking place alongside an equally furious pace of colonization in Asia and Africa. The economic expansion that enabled European tourism was fueled by colonization. The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place without raw materials from the colonies or indentured labor that could be transported easily between colonies.
Consider for instance Manila hemp. You may have come across this versatile material in your tea bag. A product extracted from the abaca plant (a relative of the banana plant), it is indigenous to the Philippines. The strong waterproof tensile fiber extracted from the abaca plant was traditionally used for making clothing in the Philippine Islands. After the Spanish colonization was followed by the U.S. takeover, Manila hemp became a crucial export item. It was used to make lightweight waterproof rope that was used for rigging ships and dragging machine pulleys. For the merchant navies and battleships of the nineteenth-century colonial empires, Manila hemp was key to safety and efficiency, as essential as the lascars, the underpaid crewmen hired in the colonies. The London Alpine Club established its credentials by creating a strong, lightweight waterproof mountain rope using three strands of Manila hemp.
Manila hemp is one of hundreds of tropical products that began getting cultivated as large-scale monocrops by European colonizers in Asia, Africa, and South America. Typically, this involved cutting down vast swaths of tropical forests and moving huge numbers of slaves or indentured laborers from populated colonies to new plantation economies. From cotton in the American South to sugar in Barbados to tea in India to rubber in Malaysia, the profits from the plantation agricultural complex undergirded European economies during the Industrial Revolution. One could call this trade, but given the inequality built into the relationship between the two parties, historians from colonized countries have identified it more accurately as plunder. Plantation agriculture also provided a template for a sophisticated economic operation in which output is maximized through low wages, division of labor, and repetitive tasks. It anticipated the assembly-line factory system. Thus, colonialism not only helped fund capitalism but also provided a production model.
It will never cease to amaze me how little this is talked about outside academia when we talk about the history of European Everything. There I am watching The Great British Bake Off, perhaps the feel-goodest program in the history of television. One of the hosts is interviewing a bread historian. Medieval British bread was chewy, the historian tells her, but with the arrival of sugar, bread could be fermented more easily.
The arrival of sugar. How innocuous that sounds, as if sugar decided one day to go on a trip to Britain. However, as Sidney Mintz put it in Sweetness and Power: “England fought the most, conquered the most colonies, imported the most slaves . . . and went furthest and fastest in creating a plantation system. The most important product of that system was sugar.” From the middle of the seventeenth century, when Britain colonized Barbados and Jamaica, well into the beginning of the twentieth century, the Caribbean was the most important source of sugar for England, which used its maritime power to transport African slaves and Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean sugar plantations and then import the molasses they produced into England. The profits of this triangular trade led to the emergence of an English bourgeoisie and enabled a range of recreational joys from baking to tourism. It should not be possible to talk of how Europe invented modernity without talking about these tiny objects—sugar, silk, Manila hemp, coffee, tobacco, cotton, tea, indigo, spices—that enriched Europe and triggered the fossil-fuel-based consumption economy that is destroying the planet today.
It should also not be possible to talk of how the British inaugurated modern tourism without talking about the other global travel of that time. Between 1700 and 1808, British and American merchants sent ships to gather enslaved people from six regions of Africa: Senegambia, Sierra Leone/Windward Coast, Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa. These ships carried the captives primarily to the British sugar islands (where more than 70 percent of them were sold, almost half of these in Jamaica), but a sizable number were also sent to French and Spanish buyers, and about one in ten was shipped to various North American destinations.
In The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker writes of the many creative and life-affirming ways in which the multiethnic Black people who were enslaved and transported in slave ships found community. They created new hybrid languages and cultures and fashioned new forms of kinship to replace what had been lost when they were abducted. Over the course of four centuries, 12.4 million Black people were trafficked, of whom 10.8 million survived the Atlantic Passage, dispersing into the populations of the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe.
After enslaved people were emancipated in the 1830s, the British solved the labor problem by using “coolies” from South Asia as well as China and the Pacific Islands. In Malayalam, my mother tongue, coolie means “daily wages.” In English, it came to mean “the indentured laborer, transported across British colonies to work in plantations for little to no wages.” In Coolie Woman, Gaiutra Bahadur writes of how, over the course of eight decades, the British ferried more than a million “coolies” to more than a dozen colonies. Many of these workers did not fully understand where they were going or what they were getting paid. They worked in sugarcane plantations all over the Caribbean, helped build railways in Africa, and served in colonial households. The reason the British tourist has an outsize place in the history of travel as the first tourists of the modern age is because of this other travel: ships full of human beings, abducted and indentured.
Several years ago, I took the Main Line train from Kandy to Colombo in Sri Lanka. This is one of the most scenic train rides in the world. It was a morning train, and many of my fellow passengers, on their way to the plains to begin the workweek, had sleep in their eyes as they swayed to the train’s movements. As the train twisted its way down rain-washed green hills, it passed tea gardens and waterfalls and temples. Suddenly rounding a cliff, it almost seemed to defy gravity and my heart beat a little faster. But nobody else on the train was worried. Elsewhere on that line, at the Demodara Loop, the train track winds around itself in a miracle of civil engineering. The train leaves the station and then enters a tunnel that is situated under that station in order to descend the hill as efficiently as possible. Legend has it that the Sri Lankan engineer responsible for envisioning this got the idea after watching a Tamil indentured laborer tie his turban securely, looping one end under the fabric.
The train is the ultimate metaphor for the long aftermath of colonialism, the tracks it leaves across the landscape of the colonized country, from mountain to port, the way it loops and twists to accommodate itself while creating a seemingly straight narrative of colonial public good. As my train glissaded its way from the hill station to the port, I imagined the sheer force of will it must have taken to lay down these tracks. It was a will motivated by the enormous profits accruing from Sri Lankan tea and coffee and powered by indentured labor.
This is the origin story of every train track laid down in the nineteenth century. The first intercity railway line in the world was the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. While it would go on to become the first railway company to profit from passenger travel, it was not originally intended to carry travelers. It was a freight train carrying cotton from the port of Liverpool to Manchester, a quiet market town of weavers that had almost overnight become one of the biggest textile-manufacturing centers of Europe.
Cotton does not grow in Britain. The European infatuation with cotton began in India, in the South Indian city of Kozhikode (which was mispronounced as Calicut), where they came across some plain-woven unbleached handloom cotton fabric. This fabric came to be known as calico. Kozhikode is where Vasco da Gama first made landfall in 1498, setting off a long chain of events that end with black pepper being available at grocery stores in Brooklyn, where I live now.
The beaches of Kozhikode are still lined with warehouses. Along its famed mittayi theruvu, street of sweets, halwa makers and handloom shops sit side by side. It is the kind of old and unremarkable street that reminds you of old and unremarkable streets in Gaziantep and Harar. Streets that smell of generations of commerce, streets full of the forgotten possibility of a softer, gentler international trade. But that was before calico and chintz and muslin and bafta and gingham and chambray, named after the small places they were made in or the hyperlocal traditions they came out of, became raw materials for European capitalism.
To be clear, cotton had been a commodity of trade long before the arrival of the Europeans. The buying and selling of cotton was a big part of medieval Afro-Eurasian trade. In the old cotton system, writes Giorgio Riello, author of Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World, cotton textiles percolated from the manufacturing hub in India across the Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan trade networks. It was the arrival of the European East Indian companies in India that restructured the system and scale of this trade. By the 1580s, the Portuguese were selling Indian cotton in North Africa and the Levant. An Indian cloth length sufficient to buy a slave in West Africa might cost twenty crusados, after which the same slave would be sold for five times as much in Brazil and eight times as much in the Caribbean and Mexican markets. Soon the Portuguese were joined by British, Dutch, and French traders. By transforming themselves from merchants to occupiers, they created the conditions that divided the world into First World and Third World. As Sven Beckert put it in Empire of Cotton, “Cotton from India, slaves from Africa, and sugar from the Caribbean moved across the planet in a complex commercial dance.”
That long-ago eighteenth-century cotton-slavery nexus and its profits created a British middle class and made the United States one of the most prosperous nations in the world. It also ensured that African American descendants of the enslaved people did not partake of any of these profits. It erased many craft traditions in the Third World and riddled those countries with poverty, while enabling high levels of consumption and high-carbon lifestyles in Western Europe and the United States. Today, one cotton farmer in India commits suicide every eight hours. Generations of cyclical debt and poverty bear down on the living, as neocolonialism continues a trajectory of exploitation that began with European imperialism. “The shift of competitive advantage in cotton textiles from India to Britain was a key episode in the Great Divergence of living standards between Europe and Asia,” write Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, who study colonial economics. Cotton, one could say, is why people from many African and Asian countries have passports that need to show bank statements as “proof of income” when they apply for a visa to the United States or Western Europe.
Trains were instrumental to this process. The United States was an early adopter of trains, with Congress giving private railroad companies permission to build railway tracks on land that belonged to various Indigenous nations. In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, Manu Karuka writes of how the government also sent its soldiers to protect the railroads. The annals of railroad building in the United States are full of stories of soldiers and railroad engineers defending the tracks and trains against various tribal attacks—in fact, the Pawnee and the Sioux and the Blackfoot and other Indigenous communities that gained a reputation for their warlike tendencies were merely resisting the illegal encroachment on their treaty-protected hunting grounds by railroad investors. The railway line that runs between Chicago and Seattle is still called the Empire Builder. Around the world, trains were empire builders.
It did not surprise me to find out that the Indian railways were built to transport cotton and other raw materials and to fortify British military outposts. What did surprise me was learning how Indian railway building was funded. I was under the impression that the Indian railways were a public works project, funded by the empire. In reality, though, the Indian railway-building project was a story of private enterprise funded by public funds. As in the case of the Manchester line, the initial impetus for building railways in India came from merchants in London who had their eye on easier access to raw cotton from India. The private investors behind railway companies persuaded the East India Company and later the British government in India to offset the risk of their investments through a system of economic guarantees wherein the government taxed its Indian subjects to make up the difference between real and projected profits. In other words, the Indian railways were funded by the British government in the same way that Donald Trump is a self-made millionaire.
This is the world that Phileas Fogg circumnavigates in Around the World in Eighty Days. Rereading the book now, I find it littered with clues about this frenetic colonial-capitalist plunder.
Francis Cromarty, a military officer whom Fogg’s party travels with in India, is on his way to Banaras to join his troops, which are encamped outside that city. Aouda, a young Parsi widow that Fogg’s party dramatically rescues from burning in her dead husband’s pyre, is from a family of cotton merchants. When Fogg’s party takes the train across the United States, the train they are traveling in is attacked by the Sioux. In the foreground of the book, we have the eccentric British gentleman whose determination and resourcefulness help him travel the world in eighty days. In the background, the crackdown on India after the Rebellion of 1857, the rapacious cotton colonialism, the rescue of women as a pretext for colonial interference, the westward expansion of the U.S. military state, the takeover of Indigenous lands, and how all this is powered by a depleting supply of fossil fuels that will lead to more and more planetary destruction. On the final lap of his journey, after he has missed the transatlantic liner that will take him from New York back to England, Fogg hires a trading ship whose captain agrees to take him to France. As soon as he gets on the ship, Fogg promptly bribes the crew and takes the captain hostage and sets the ship sailing for England. Toward the end of this voyage, the coal supply runs low. Unwittingly foreshadowing climate change, Fogg starts burning the wood in the very frame of the ship he is traveling in so that he can keep it moving to reach England in eighty days.
Of course, ten-year-old me, jolting along in a familiar blue train that smelled of diesel and chai and stopped for imagined gold-chain robbers, did not know all this. So even as I was skeptical of Fogg’s faith in the punctuality of trains, I marveled at the cool confidence with which Phileas Fogg expected to travel around the world in eighty days. Even his friends at the Reform Club didn’t think it possible, hence the wager. But even in their incredulity, there is entitlement. As Lord Albemarle says: “If the thing is feasible, the first to do it ought to be an Englishman.”
Fogg’s confidence and nonchalance in the face of adversity is something Jules Verne presents as an extraordinary personality trait. But Fogg is simply a product of his time and place. Self-confidence was the Victorians’ chief characteristic, as James Munson and Richard Mullen put it in The Smell of the Continent: The British Discover Europe. British tourists were armed with the belief that their country was the most important one in the world. In this and other matters, this fictional story about one man’s epic quest to circumnavigate the world by train and steamer is actually a nonfiction history of how an empire furnishes its citizens with the possibility of travel and how such travel, with its individualistic and heroic overtones, subtly reinforces the empire. Fogg’s confidence in himself is actually his trust in the empire. British wanderlust was financed and operationalized by the colonies.
Strictly speaking, wanderlust is not an object, like cotton is. And yet, to me, wanderlust is material. Wanderlust is an act of consumption. The $8 trillion tourism industry has become adept at dressing it up as a dream, a feeling, a natural instinct, when, in fact, wanderlust is made possible by colonialism and capitalism. Eighteenth-century colonialism gave us Wanderlust 1.0, and twentieth-century capitalism gave us Wanderlust 2.0, and now here we are, poised on the verge of yet another software update to wanderlust.
This is why wanderlust frequently attaches itself to advertising copy for objects that do not have any connection to wandering. As twenty-first-century consumers, our imagination has been trained to be tempted by these intertextual cross-cultural references even when we don’t fully understand them. So of course we get it—wanderlust in a credit card ad is referring to a certain kind of luxury travel; wanderlust in a coffee ad is suggesting how your favorite beverage came to you from far away and thereby drinking it is an act of travel; wanderlust in a clothing ad is painting a vision of how these clothes can renew you as if you were traveling. This is one of my hobbies: decoding #wanderlust in advertising copy.
My favorite example of this is the Indian designer Sabyasachi’s 2021 “Wanderlust” collection for H&M. The collection featured the kind of gauzy floral block prints and flowy fabrics that are considered ethnic clothing on women of color and resort wear on white women. “I am a nomad at heart,” Sabyasachi said in an interview with Vogue India, describing how the collection, “aimed at the millennials who love adventure and glamping,” offers customers a vision of the travel that they missed so much during the pandemic. The aesthetic is generally bohemian, with tons of loose fabric and layers of jangling jewelry and a general air of idleness. But the romance underpinning this hinges on what the cultural critic Paromita Vohra called the “iconography of tropical colonialism”—heat, dust, and pale, gaunt models on verandas and in gardens that suggest, without showing, silent servants to bring cold drinks.
I came across another intriguing example of wanderlust haymaking while sunshining in a 2021 press release from the Four Seasons hotel group:
After a year of lockdowns and restrictions, it’s clear that travel is more than just a “nice to have”: it’s an essential part of life for many. Now, as vacations and getaways become less of a dream and more of a possibility, travelers can finally shift from wanderlust—the longing to travel—to wandermust, the insatiable need to travel.”
This is indeed the key to modern wanderlust: its insatiability. And it is not the insatiability of curiosity. It is the insatiability of consumption. As sociologist Colin Campbell wrote, modern consumption is less about satisfying a want and more about finding the next want.. “No sooner is one satisfied than another is waiting in line clamoring to be satisfied; when this one is attended to, another appears, then subsequently a fourth and so on, apparently without end . . . How is it possible for wants to appear with such constancy, and in such an inexhaustible fashion?” he asks, and I feel the despair in the question. I want to take a moment and sit down with this question, and I will do it, right after I finish planning my summer travels. I have to research airfares, click through hundreds of Instagram posts, read hotel reviews. I have to buy a new suitcase.
We, the moderns, travel not because we have wanderlust but because we can have wanderlust. It doesn’t bubble up from the wild pockets of humanness deep inside our souls; rather, it is programmed into the suggestible material of our consciousness by the media we are surrounded by, whether it is Wordsworth’s poetry or that Instagram influencer pulling her boyfriend into the frame in front of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice one week and a beach in Bali a few weeks later.
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During those long overnight train rides of my childhood, sitting in my second-class compartment, I often wondered about the first-class compartments. What did the air-conditioning feel like? Were the seats softer? Were the toilets cleaner? It was like thinking about a foreign country. It rarely occurred to me to wonder about the general class, which is the cheapest and hence poorest class of travel in Indian trains. When I did think of the people in those compartments, I felt a vague kindness. Those poor people. I hope it’s not too bad for them. Then my thoughts would wander again toward the air-conditioned first-class compartments. Did they get better food in there? Were their cutlets crisper? Was their coffee less watery?
Regardless of the class of travel, many Indian trains discharge human waste on the rails. This poses an unsightly problem, considering 23 million passengers ride around twelve thousand Indian trains daily. The problem has been solved thus far by using manual scavengers. Note the passive voice. The Indian railways categorically state that they do not employ humans to remove excrement and rubbish from the tracks. Manual scavenging is prohibited in India, especially since it has been associated with caste oppression. Yet the feces on the tracks continue to be carted away by human beings using brooms. In Unseen: The Truth About Manual Scavenging, Bhasha Singh writes about how the railways get away with this by simply not acknowledging the sanitation workers as their employees. Instead they outsource the cleaning to the contractors, who employ sanitation workers, most of them drawn from the most oppressed castes. The capitalist logic of outsourcing work thus enables the feudal logic of caste oppression.
The coffee was just as watery, I found out after graduating into first-class compartments occasionally as an upwardly mobile adult. The creature comforts were just slightly better. But what I was paying for now was not so much comfort as insulation. The first-class compartments insulate those who are traveling in them from crowds, the noise and smells of those crowds, the frustration of crowds and the frustration of being part of a crowd. Briefly we can pretend to live in a world that is not bursting at the seams with needs, a world where the means and ends are in the right proportion. Perhaps this is the underlying premise of luxury—to not see other people’s needs.
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From the beginning, trains were a site of class anxiety. Early British trains offered three different classes of travel, and the third class was an open boxcar until 1844, when the British parliament laid down a law that third-class travelers must be sheltered from the elements and provided with seats. When we think of vintage train travel, we usually think of the Orient Express, but it was that bare-bones third-class seat, costing a penny per mile, that propelled tourism into a mass market phenomenon. Thus, while they were enabling imperial enrichment, trains were also democratizing travel. In this, they represent the contradictions at the heart of so much tourism. As mid-nineteenth-century labor legislation compelled employers to make half Saturdays and Sundays holidays, it was trains that made it possible for European factory workers to participate in the possibilities of leisure: the day trip to the beach, team sports, and, of course, the packaged tour. I do not have any evidence for this, but “So what are you doing this weekend?,” the question dreaded by introverts everywhere, probably has its provenance around this time.
The packaged tour was the brainchild of a Baptist minister, Thomas Cook, whose original mission was to rid the world of alcoholism. The first Cook’s Tour, in which he took 570 passengers on a one-day rail excursion on July 5, 1841, was to a temperance rally with anti-drink speakers and bands. It might seem like a funny coincidence that nineteenth century’s most famous travel agent began as a temperance evangelist. So much of tourism history is about these funny coincidences that turn out to be subterranean socioeconomic interlinkages. The working-class tourist excursion was a solution to a question that vexed English policymakers and social reformers deeply in the middle of the nineteenth century. In The Tourist Gaze, John Urry writes that as work came to be organized as a relatively time-bound and space-bound activity separate from play, religion, and festivity, it became necessary to invent rational recreation. As the idle poor were converted into working classes, it became necessary to give them opportunities for well-behaved leisure. Thomas Cook’s first temperance tour was an attempt at this. Its success motivated him to offer more ambitious vacation packages. In 1845, he organized a trip to Scotland. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. There were no toilets on the train, tea was promised but never appeared, and, on the way to Scotland, the steamship ran into a storm. The passengers, who had each paid fourteen shillings, were wet, hungry, and tired. It was magnificent. And mass tourism was born.
I thought of those first tourists when I came across an April 2011 article in The New Yorker in which Evan Osnos treated himself to the “Classic European,” an all-inclusive Chinese packaged tour that would cover five countries in ten days. Osnos is the only non-Chinese person on the tour, and over the course of the article, we meet his Chinese traveling companions and see their responses to Europe, the suburban hotels they stay in to save money, the windowless-basement Chinese restaurant in Paris where they eat lunch, the Chinese-language welcome cards they receive at the department store Galeries Lafayette “promising happiness, longevity, and a ten-per-cent discount,” in a mysterious place called Aotelaise that Osnos eventually decodes as “outlets.”
For years, this article stayed with me, with its casually mocking descriptions of the Chinese tourists traveling outside their country. Early on, while flying to Frankfurt, Osnos opens his packet of “Outbound Group Advice.” The tour members are discouraged from giving money to “Gypsies begging beside the road.” Someone asking for help taking a photo could be a con artist. “I’d been in and out of Europe over the years, but the instructions put it in a new light, and I was oddly reassured to be travelling with three dozen others and a guide,” Osnos says, slyly setting his own worldliness against the naivete of the Chinese tourists. They represent a new vanguard of Chinese travel, after decades of Communist suspicion of tourism, he informs the reader. About China’s remarkable medieval history of maritime inventors and navigators and diplomats and adventurous Buddhist pilgrims, Osnos has one sentence: “Zheng He, a fifteenth-century eunuch, famously sailed the emperor’s fleet as far as Africa, to ‘set eyes on barbarian regions.’”
At one point, the Chinese guide tells the tourists: “In China, we think of bus drivers as superhumans who can work twenty-four hours straight, no matter how late we want them to drive. But in Europe, unless there’s weather or traffic, they’re only allowed to drive for twelve hours!” I knew that the guide must have said this. I knew that sentence must have gone through The New Yorker’s rigorous fact-checking process. So why did that exclamation mark at the end of that sentence feel so wrong? That exclamation mark was making fun of the traveler from the developing country, wide-eyed and awestruck, not by European culture and history but by the human rights of bus drivers.
While the Chinese tourists are busy seeing the sights of Europe, the Chinese tourists are the “sights” that Osnos is seeing. Each tourist emerges as a type symbolizing something Chinese and nouveau riche, from the frugal couple who kept track of exactly how much the group had spent on each bottle of water to the teenager who asks Osnos if the American constitution prevents private companies from getting government support. Readers are supposed to be marveling at the small-mindedness of the tourists, but instead I found myself marveling at the nouveau-Orientalism of the article. It illustrates so thoroughly what Debbie Lisle in The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing calls contemporary travel writing’s participation in the anxieties created by globalization. Lisle astutely observes that contemporary travel writing often alleviates these anxieties by reproducing the logic of a colonial vision, but in a cosmopolitan guise. This is not an unreconstructed version of Orientalism, Lisle notes, because contemporary travel writers know enough to frame their encounters with others in positive ways, revealing moments of empathy and recognition of difference, realizations of equality. However, the cosmopolitan vision is firmly undergirded by the colonial vision of an enlightened and superior western traveler constructing an inferior “other” in order to justify the continuation of hierarchical global relations.
In 2019, the year that the Thomas Cook travel agency declared bankruptcy abruptly in September, leaving about 150,000 British travelers stranded around the globe, the number of outbound tourists from China reached nearly 163 million. Prior to Covid-19’s upending travel routines, Chinese travelers had surpassed U.S. tourist spending and were only slightly behind in terms of volume: for comparison, in 2018, U.S. travelers took 157,873,000 trips abroad, with each tourist spending an average of $1,155, while Chinese tourists took 154,632,000 trips abroad, spending $1,794 per capita. Little wonder then that many tourist sites in Europe are adding Mandarin audio guides to their offerings while upmarket department stores such as Galeries Lafayette and Printemps are frantically wooing Chinese tourists with store maps in Chinese and Chinese-speaking store attendants.
In the changing landscape of contemporary tourism, poking fun at Chinese tourists is about as useful as searching for an authentic curry. These ships have sailed long ago—literally and metaphorically. We are all tourists now, those of us who describe ourselves as travelers and nomads and vagrants the more so because it simply means we have bought into the ultimate tourist myth, that we can escape tourism and simply travel.
A few years ago, my husband and I were walking around Barcelona when we got a hankering for Thai food. Even now, I feel a twinge of embarrassment to be admitting this, but there we were. After two weeks wandering around Spain eating tortilla de papas, after a delightfully comic afternoon when we had racked our brains to ask for hot sauce in Spanish and were offered a tureen of warm gravy, after encountering gazpacho’s charming cousin salmorejo, after all that—we had the hubris to be bored. To think, Wouldn’t it be nice to dig into a big garlicky bowl of noodles, laced with lemongrass and soy sauce? So we looked up Thai restaurants on our phones and made for the nearest one: a businesslike little restaurant on a side street in the touristy district. Inside, the restaurant was all tourists like us, slightly shamefaced, as if Anthony Bourdain could see us all and was shaking his head in disgust. The menu spelled out in English the usual suspects: the various pads, the curries in primary and secondary colors. But toward the back of the restaurant was a doorway that, strangely enough, led to the restaurant next door. And the aromas coming through that doorway were familiar and enticing. We walked through and found ourselves in an Indian restaurant, but unlike the Thai restaurant, it clearly knew what it was doing. We decided to put away our Thai food hankerings and ate excellent dal and aloo gobi for lunch.
After I paid our bill to the Indian man who sat behind the cash counter, after he and I compared our different migration paths and checked if we knew anyone in common among the 1 billion people back home, I asked him about the Thai restaurant he was running next door. “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s for Americans. Thai food very popular with them.”
He had seen us coming before we even got our hankerings. He knew that he could count on enough tourists from the United States to get bored with Spanish food and hanker for Thai food. And we had obliged. We had been programmed by the algorithm of our life in Brooklyn, where Thai restaurants dot the landscape liberally and we look forward to our weekly pad kee mao. Like Pavlov’s dog, we developed a craving for Thai food exactly ten days, three hours, forty minutes, and six seconds into our travels in Spain. Hmmm, we would think, from the eternal sunshine of the spotless American tourist mind, how strange, but I seem to be wanting a big garlicky bowl of noodles, laced with lemongrass and soy sauce.
On the surface, the backstory of a moment like this contains two obvious strands: the South Asian entrepreneurial migration and the abundance of “ethnic” foods from around the globe in the United States. But there’s at least one more surprising strand braided into this hybridity. In 2002, the Thai government launched a program of culinary diplomacy aimed at increasing the number of Thai restaurants around the world. Over the course of the next decade, the number of Thai restaurants in First World countries such as the United States, New Zealand, and Australia rose exponentially as the Thai government trained thousands of chefs, offered loans to Thai nationals who wanted to start restaurants, and published a training manual on catering to foreign taste buds. The aim was simply to popularize dishes such as pad thai and pad see ew. The program was based on an astute calculation that these dishes would in turn inspire tourism to Thailand—the calculation paid off, and Thailand increasingly became a major tourist destination, leaving neighboring countries well behind in number of visitors.
When I think of my favorite travel moments, I often return to this scene. Of course, a deep state conspiracy to feed me pad kee mao is delightful in itself, but what is especially delicious is all the sweet and sour ironies of the moment. Finally, travel had paid off in an epiphany, and the epiphany was that I was a cliché. A tourist. How bracing it is to catch a glimpse of the software that is running me and hundreds of thousands of others, silently and efficiently humming away beneath the surface of our wanderlust. And equally, how invigorating to encounter the multiple hybridities of this place we call the twenty-first century.