The earliest written accounts of Tahiti date from the 1760s and 1770s when a succession of European voyagers arrived at the island. The first of these was the Englishman Samuel Wallis in 1767, followed by the Frenchman Louis de Bougainville in 1768 and then James Cook in 1769. The subsequent colonisation of Tahiti was slow and marked by co-operation between the two major European powers in the region, with French and British influence on the island alternating until the mid-nineteenth century. British missionaries arrived in 1797 and by the 1820s had established a virtual Protestant theocracy across the Tahitian archipelago. The arrival of French Catholic missionaries in the 1830s resulted in tension between the two missions and a French protectorate being established in 1842. Both missions persisted but Britain accepted French claims to the group in the 1847 Declaration of London, and French annexation of the islands was completed in the 1880s. British and French writing about Tahiti has a similar history of intersection and mutual influence. Bougainville’s Voyage Autour du Monde (1771) was translated into English the following year by the father-and-son team of J. R. and George Forster, the German-born but English-domiciled scientists who sailed on Cook’s second voyage in 1772 to 1775, and whose own subsequent accounts of the voyage are a vital source of knowledge of the Pacific at this time. This cross-Channel discourse inaugurated a tradition that has persisted so strongly that to concentrate entirely on anglophone travel writing would be to distort the picture.

How to write about India? The novelist Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith opens The East India Sketch-Book (1832) with this question. Her narrator itemises the tropes and genres available: a land of Arabian Nights exoticism, a country unchanged for 3,000 years, or a site to be mined for statistical information. Addressing a companion slumbering on a coach, the narrator reads aloud excerpts from half-written verse dramas, steeped in Romantic Orientalism, followed by entries from a journal of military life ('Twaddle!' comments the friend). Finally the narrator, lacking the necessary 'powers of attention and abstraction' to describe 'the length and breadth and height of mountains and minarets, palaces and pagodas, tanks and mausoleums', also rejects the travel account; 'besides', the narrator adds, 'you can learn all this from the thousand and one veracious Travels Through Hindostan'. Smith's introduction both justifies her own choice of the 'sketch-book' form and dramatises the sense of belatedness that haunts the early nineteenth-century travel writer: the conventions for representing India are already fixed, the genres well-worn, and the land over-described.

It is noteworthy that Westerners' oldest destination of travel, seasonal migration, and colonisation should have received its name only in recent times. The term 'Middle East' is a neologism, invented in 1902 by US naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan to designate the sea and land stretching between a farther East - India - and a nearer one, extending towards the westernmost territories of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. The centre of Mahan's idiosyncratic map was the Persian Gulf - anticipating later US interest in the area. The new epithet was immediately taken up by The Times, put into circulation by officialdom, and gradually extended to include the mass of land under Ottoman rule - stretching from the Black Sea to equatorial Africa and from India to the heart of the Mediterranean.

‘Middle East’ did not supplant the considerably older term ‘Orient’, but was used interchangeably with it, replicating images of the West’s ‘other’ which characterised European discourses on the East. Both terms embody the ambiguous position of this area in these discourses and reflect an ethnocentric and hierarchical view of the world with the West at its centre and as its standard but, at the same time, indicating the relational positions of Europe and the Middle East and of the latter and the Far East. Raymond Schwab captures this relationality in his classical distinction between the Indian Orient discovered by European Orientalists in the eighteenth century and that older Orient, part of the ‘European room’, the locus of Graeco-Roman and Judeo- Christian civilisations which had shaped Europe itself.

While it is commonplace to associate the eighteenth-century traveller with traditional Grand Tourism, this period also witnessed the emergence of a more locally focused form of travel, sometimes described as the Home Tour. Literally cut off from continental Europe at the time of the Napoleonic wars (c.1790-1815), increasing numbers of British travellers turned to their 'own' countries from the late 1760s onwards, visiting the Peak District and the Lake District within England, while the more adventurous journeyed into Wales, and eventually towards the Scottish Highlands and Islands, as well as across the sea to Ireland. In order to give some sense of the cultural background to these developments, this essay provides a brief account of several eighteenth-century travel accounts written about Britain before moving to a fuller consideration of Irish travel, which saw sustained interest during the same decades, but an even greater emphasis after 1800. Throughout the nineteenth century, discussions concerning national identity, security, and the future political relations between these islands permeate travellers' accounts, indicating that geographical distance was not the sole criterion for determining 'strangeness'.

During the period which is the subject of this essay, travel writing became increasingly identified with the interests and preoccupations of those in European societies who wished to bring the non-European world into a position where it could be influenced, exploited or, in some cases, directly controlled. In the case of Britain, the identification was particularly close. There was some political control but more significant were various kinds of relationships stopping short of direct administration which historians have struggled to characterise by terms such as 'informal empire' or 'unofficial imperialism'. Trade, diplomacy, missionary endeavour, and scientific exploration might all contribute to the British expansion and each produced its own travel writing. Increasing European technological expertise provided advantages which made it easier to influence or dominate non-Europeans. With technological superiority came presumed intellectual superiority: Europeans could claim to be able to understand and interpret not only the terrain they entered but the inhabitants as well.

Travel writing, then, has a complex relationship with the situations in which it arose. In this essay it is taken to mean a discourse designed to describe and interpret for its readers a geographical area together with its natural attributes and its human society and culture. Travel writing may embrace approaches ranging from an exposition of the results of scientific exploration claiming (but rarely managing) to be objective and value-free to the frankly subjective description of the impact of an area and its people on the writer’s own sensibilities. There was, in fact, a tension between supposedly scientific discourses on discoveries and travel writing of wider sympathies. ‘Exploration’ and ‘travel’ may indeed be distinguished even if there is a large grey area between them.