3. Thomas Sandby, older brother of Paul Sandby, undertook a sketching tour of Derbyshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1774. Although he was the first professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, his credentials as a cultural arbiter were questioned by some, not least because he never went on the continental Grand Tour. As John Bonehill argues in his chapter ‘Moving Pictures: Thomas Sandby Tours the East Midlands and Yorkshire’, however, Sandby used his English tour to help define his cultural authority, through producing paintings and prints of gentlemen’s seats, such as Wentworth Castle and Wentworth House in Yorkshire, and of s/r structures such as the Italianate palazzo Nottingham Castle. Bonehill shows that Sandby developed a mode of visual ‘storytelling’ that depicted these and other sites in associationist rather than statically picturesque terms, accentuating their geographical and historical connections and their place in wider networks of circulation. This approach at once proclaimed the extensiveness of his horizons as a landscape artist and the value of the scenes that he painted, now marked out as a kind of native ‘classic ground’.

5. In ‘“Another View of Ireland”: Tourism and War on the “Irish Road” in 1790s Wales’, Mary-Ann Constantine notes the coalescence of ‘a shared “tourist” aesthetic’ across Britain and Ireland encompassing a familiar array of images and subjects. She goes on, however, to complicate narratives of British cultural interconnection by acknowledging a deeper history of connections across the archipelago and then discussing the crossings of travellers between Ireland and Wales during the 1790s, before and after the United Irish rebellion of 1798. With reference to the writings of Catherine Hutton and Elizabeth Smith, she considers how an established tourist site such as Caernarfon was understood not only as shadowed by the violence of the past but also as a destination for Irish migrants fleeing the strife of the present. Catherine Hutton’s tour, she shows, additionally demonstrates the reverberation of the events of the French Revolution, because in her account of ordering her accommodation in Caernarfon, Hutton invokes the tragic figure of the Girondin Madame Roland, whose memoirs record the conditions of her imprisonment prior to her execution at the guillotine.

Introduction: the introduction sets up relevant historical and cultural contexts regarding the invention of Britain and the United Kingdom and the development of tourism in the four nations. It explains the volume’s rationale and timeliness, surveys critical materials in this area, and offers a plan of the book and a rundown of individual chapters

2. George III was renowned for visiting south coast towns such as Weymouth rather than travelling further afield for his amusements, and the increasing popularity of seaside holidays among Britons in the second half of the eighteenth century no doubt generated a sharper apprehension of what it meant to inhabit a relatively small island separated from the continent, if not an identification with the idea of ‘island race’ exceptionalism. Guest’s essay ‘Frances Burney at the Seaside’ discusses the representation of Brighton, Southampton, and other seaside towns in Burney’s Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties (1814), and it looks at how they explore the ambiguity around social differentiation that is a feature of depictions of coastal resorts, where the beach was a place of work as well as a public space open to all. It argues that Burney’s novels address social change through the language of gender difference, and that in doing so they invite us to think about both the potential freedoms available to women in socially mixed spaces and the jeopardy faced by figures such as Camilla, as she herself becomes an object of the tourist gaze.

11. Daniel O’Quinn’s ‘Metropolitan Thresholds: Abu Talib, Juliette Récamier, and Touristic Worldmaking’ presents the ‘accidental tourist’ Abu Talib as one who – even as he was the object of others’ attention – sought to resist being absorbed into a celebratory idea of the imperial metropolis as a world city that subsumed multitudes. O’Quinn considers the critical dialogue between Abu Talib’s Masir-i-Talibi (later translated as Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan) and works such as Richard Phillips’s Modern London (1804), and it also discusses an episode where, at a masquerade hosted by Mrs Orby Hunter, the ‘Persian Prince’ encountered among others a non-elite Briton passing as a ‘Hindoo Rajah’ and the French socialite Juliette Récamier. For O’Quinn, Abu Talib manipulated the fantasies which others imposed upon him, and rather than offer a reflection of British imperial power instead provided a longue durée perspective on its transience: O’Quinn’s conclusion regarding Abu Talib’s ‘latitude to both bear witness to the metropole and displace its claim to centrality’ provides a fitting end to this volume.

The book’s conclusion asserts that the overseer-state, in terms of both labor governance and responses to it, was one of the most important “legacies of slavery.” The effects of the indenture system were particularly profound and widespread, most visibly in the social, political, and cultural dynamics of multiracial (but highly unequal) societies in Mauritius, the British Caribbean, and Malaya, and in the establishment of long-range, long-term labor mobility as the norm in a globalized system of labor transportation and organization. Through the overseer-state, the long-term impact of slavery and its aftermath were felt acutely even in places such as Malaysia, where plantation slavery had never been a prevalent practice. In the regions where the British imperial state was most powerful, the dynamics of governance and the history of slavery remained entangled well beyond the centenary of the slave trade’s abolition.