This collection of essays is intended as a response to, and a stimulus for, the growing visibility of the history of tourism as an essential component both of historical understanding and of the development of a grounded, humanistic dimension to the increasingly interdisciplinary ventures that come under the label of tourism studies (Baranowski & Furlough, 2001; Berghoff et al., 2002; Historia Contemporánea, 2002; Tissot, 2003). It is clear that the history of tourism is (at last) developing as an exciting and dynamic field, and that (fittingly) it is advancing on a broad international front, as indicated by the formal constitution in 2002 of the International Commission for the History of Travel and Tourism as an accredited section of the International Commission for the Historical Sciences; by the emergence of a dedicated tourism history journal, published in Naples (Storia del Turismo); and by the increased interest in travel and tourism now being taken by the long-established Journal of Transport History. The importance of the contribution of history to the understanding of tourism as an outstandingly significant current phenomenon, the world's largest and most dynamic industry, a leading sector both in continuing globalisation and the generation of cultural resistance to its implications, with the capacity to create enormous environmental footprints and to transform cultures in ways that are hard to predict, is now beginning to gain recognition within tourism studies, which has been slow to accept that it needs to learn from historical studies, and within history, whose innate conservatism as a discipline has tended to relegate it to the margins of the allegedly inconsequential. This latter is an increasingly bizarre standpoint but professional inertia has made it disproportionately difficult to dispel.