From 1880 to 1900, Luxor, nested in the heart of its temple, was shaped from a “miserable village” to a modern city which offered the best services, and attracted the cosmopolitan society from all over the world. This process was initiated by two men, French Gaston Maspero, head of the antiquity department in Egypt, and British John Mason Cook, son of Thomas Cook, who invented modern tourism, and whose company diligently served the British Empire interests in the region. This “entente cordiale” beforehand, reflected a shared vision from both men: putting Egypt on the global map, in line with the broader colonial project at stake, and manufacturing the newly-born city of Luxor for the Other, i.e. the scholar and the European tourist. This paper seeks to analyze and document the modern history of a territory in Upper Egypt that has been very little studied. Tourism and Egyptology worked together to manufacture Luxor, meanwhile serving European and colonial interests. They both determined its “raison d’être” in the national landscape and for the central authorities (colonial, then Egyptian). Based on official reports, memoires, archaeological photographs, press archives and travelers accounts, this paper recounts the becoming of the Luxor as it is now known, shedding light on the role of tourism industry and Egyptology in shaping modern urban spaces outside of the capital city, and dedicated to a non-Egyptian audience. With its more complete understanding of Luxor’s modern history, the paper then addresses the exploitation Luxor’s heritage sites as a economic resource (for tourism) and in serving the national narrative and struggle for independence.

In the two last decades of the Mubarak presidency, the Egyptian tourism industry expanded significantly, making Egypt Africa’s most-visited tourism destination: two million international visitors in 1990 become 14.7 million in 2010. The expansion was mainly a result of the opening up of the Red Sea Riviera to tourism following Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, leading to a restructuring of the industry’s core activities from cultural tourism in the Nile Valley to Sun & Sea tourism along the Red Sea. By 2010, tourism had developed into a fundamental part of the Egyptian economy, employing four million Egyptians and allegedly feeding another twelve. Since the 1990s, government officials have talked about tourism as a catalyst for economic development, peace processes, economic liberalization and global integration. In this paper, I take these discourses about Egyptian tourism’s effects and functions as a vantage point for highlighting another type of work that tourism did in the late Mubarak era. I argue that tourism, as a multi-layered image producer, played a significant role in projecting (neo)liberal narratives and images of Egypt to the outside world, in a period when realities on the ground spoke of continuing crony capitalism and increased securitization and police control. My analysis builds on interviews with officials at the Egyptian tourism authorities and the private marketing agencies that these authorities contract, conducted in Egypt during fieldwork in 2011-2013. I also rely on close readings of promotional materials. More specifically, the paper explores some effects of Egypt’s expanding infrastructures for producing and circulating glossy and groomed images of itself. Since 1994, touristic Egypt has been marketed through Public Private Partnership. The linkage of worldwide marketing and research networks gave Egyptian actors access to extensive information about potential visitors’ travel habits and imaginaries of Egypt. I argue that these new regimes for knowing Egypt’s ‘global audience’ enabled the tourism industry and the regime to calibrate and attune Egypt’s general and touristic image worldwide to key political developments and geopolitical imaginaries. Partly this was done through direct advertisement campaigns, but also more subtle means, such as PR and news placements, were used. As a conclusion, I suggest that tourism played an integral part in the making of Mubarak’s Egypt; tourism was intimately entangled with Egyptian national and international politics, and the tourism imagery became an asset as the regime worked to gloss over and fade out undesired, challenging stories of Egypt on the world stage.

This paper will explore the relationship between constructions of national historical narratives and the nascent tourist industry in Lebanon from the late 1920s through the 1940s, with an emphasis on the decade of the 1930s. It will investigate the ways in which the political territory of “Lebanon” during the French mandate was defined, exhibited, marketed, and manifested. It aims to show how hoteliers, guidebook writers, journalists, as well as ‘average’ citizens identified different “tourist publics” as Lebanese, Arab, or ‘western’, and will explore the assumptions that underwrote how those groups were defined as consumers and to what purpose. It analyzes representations of the land, on the one hand, and the village, on the other, to illustrate how the rural was deployed to indicate authenticity and tradition while simultaneously buttress a tourist industry that had a distinctly urban – and urbane – character in the form of beauty pageants. In the process, this paper will reveal similarities and differences in the ways that the Lebanese and the French understood the role that tourism could play in building a national economy with limited available natural resources; in delineating political boundaries within Lebanon as well as at its edges; and in cementing an image of national patrimony marked by particular materiality.

The division of the Near East into British and French Mandate territories after World War I introduced new realities for people on the ground, establishing nation-states in formation. This paper uses research on 1930s Mandate-era efforts to promote Lebanon tourism to Palestinians as a case study for understanding how nation-state-ness was taking hold on the ground, and then turns to 1940s initiatives to promote Palestine as the “national” tourism destination for Palestinians. What did it mean for people who had for centuries lived under one imperial government to suddenly become separate national communities in equally separate states: new border crossings, new visa and passport requirements, new currencies, new taxes, new ministries, and so on? Using newspaper advertisements, articles, and archival documents, this paper examines how Lebanon was marketed to Palestinian vacationers as “Palestine’s summer residence”. It turns to Lebanese newspapers of the same era to compare the advertisements there – some for the very same hotels –, noting the promotion and development of domestic tourism in this same era, while highlighting the differences between advertisements aimed at Lebanese and Palestinian audiences. It then examines efforts by Ramallah hoteliers in particular to promote Palestine as the “national” summer residence for Palestinians, seeing this as a competitive response and a reflection of Palestine’s contested national identity. The paper will conclude by arguing that regional tourism is a key node for a better understanding the messy process of establishing national identities in states around the region. It suggests that this process takes place on a capillary level – by the self-interested actions of individual business owners – rather than solely or primarily as a top-down, government or elite-led practice. It further argues that this process for smaller countries must also be understood as taking place not in isolation in conjunction and competition with neighboring states: that Lebanese hoteliers and others in the tourism industry were in part defining Lebanon as distinct from Palestine even while promoting the country to Palestinians.

This paper explores the rise of Beirut as a regional commercial aviation hub in the 1950 and 1960s and it impact on the development of the international tourism industry in Lebanon. This story is defined by the intersection of the global politics of commercial aviation as they incorporated the Middle East, dominated by rise of American commercial airlines, and the evolution of Middle East Airlines (MEA) that becomes the leading carrier across the Middle East until its operations are disrupted by regional conflicts. The development of commercial aviation in the region referred to as the ‘aerial crossroad of the world’ relied heavily on US war-time and early post war efforts to build facilities, provide equipment, and offer training. US flag carriers developed operations in the region as part of their construction of global networks, with TWA passing though Cairo and PanAm through Beirut. While Cairo has developed as a war-time travel center, by the by the mid-1950s, Beirut emerged a leading hub due to the vast expansion of MEA operations and network and PanAm’s global dominance. Drawing on economic affairs periodicals, aviation & tourism trade publications, government documents, the PanAm archives in Miami, FL, and published memoirs this paper situation the rise of Beirut as a travel hub within the ‘end of empire’ politics of commercial aviation that saw the eclipse of British imperial air dominance in the face of the US effort to build an ‘empire of the air.’ Rather than serving as a prestige national symbol, like other state-owned airlines in the region, MEA skillfully negotiated between US, UK, and French airlines to access the capital, equipment, and training to sustain it highly profitable, vast expansion across the region. Both MEA and Beirut airport, which hosted more other airlines than any other in the region, were positioned to exploit both the expansions of leisure and business travel from Europe and the growth of travel to/from the oil-rich Gulf. The paper argues that much of economic expansion and image of Lebanon as destination for the cosmopolitan jet-set was enabled by the dynamics of commercial aviation development that expanded aeromobility for residents and visitors of the region. While Beirut airport and MEA remained resilience throughout the 1958 crisis, numerous hijacking, and the 1969 Israeli bombing of the airport and destruction of half the MEA fleet, with the outbreak of the 1975 civil war its years of expansion were ended.