The relationship between travel writing and the historical narrative is complex and conflicted, fraught with a series of connections and tensions. Although Edward Said and Sara Mills warn us about how travel texts can disseminate discourses of difference, there is a growing demand among historians for access to travel writing as a documentary source offering unique insights into the past and allowing for nuanced understandings of cross-cultural relations. In this context, travel texts provide historical information about a range of topics, from the everyday to the extraordinary, thus complementing the contemporary historical interest in diaries, journals, letters and memoirs as records of everyday life. Indeed, reading travel texts as historical sources can supply first-hand accounts of the everyday traveller in a period, detailing key interests and themes, as well as presenting snapshots of cities, cultures and customs. In some cases, major historical events are captured by eyewitnesses; in other instances, the traveller simply relates experiences that illustrate the rise of modern tourism and the travel industry.