(RESUBMITTING IN 2024) In April 1931, Gaston Doumergue, the president of France (r. 1924-1931), travelled to Kairouan and attended a major touristic festival. The festival offered pay-per-view spectacles like the performance of Sufi rites and a “Grande Fantasia,” which featured a competition among tribal horsemen, a bridal ceremony, a camel troop raid, Arabic music, snake charmers, Black musicians, and magicians. The entrance fee for attending the Sufi rites was 5 francs and 10 francs for the Grande Fantasia. This festival was typical of “ethnographic” sightseeing, which, by 1931, was one of the main sub-sectors of Tunisia’s emerging tourism industry, alongside wintering and thermal stations, archeological sightseeing, automobile excursions, and cruises. 1931 marked 50 years since the founding of French protectorate in Tunisia. It was also an occasion to take stock of the concomitant rise of an organized tourism industry there—a reckoning that was chronicled in Le Journal des Touristes, a Tunis-based tourism trade magazine edited by the French journalist Armand Ravelet. Primarily drawing on accounts in this magazine that described the establishment of hospitality amenities and opportunities for ethnographic and archaeological sightseeing, I argue that this industry was a colonial-capitalist enterprise that advanced French imperialism in interwar Tunisia. Tourism was deeply intertwined with other colonial-capitalist enterprises built on extractive practices. Entrepreneurs active in the tourism industry often had experience in other industries like the transport, finance, and agriculture. And as with North Africa’s agricultural resources, colonial entrepreneurs justified their commodification of Tunisian natural resources—human and non-human alike—on the basis that Tunisians had failed to do so adequately for themselves. A colonial-capitalist enterprise, the modern Tunisian tourism industry was initially developed by colonists for colonists. This paper would thus aim to engage with histories of capitalism and scholarship critical of dominant modes of “economic development,” which have often done more to support colonial-capitalist projects of value extraction from colonized populations than to improve their socio-economic well-being.