ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the meaning and complexity of tourism, its history, and how social changes since the Industrial Revolution have shaped contemporary mass participation in tourism. For instance Davidson besides recognising leisure or recreation as the main type of tourism draws attention to the importance of travel for business, study, religious and health purposes. The origins of tourism lie in travel for reasons of faith, education and health. The chapter evaluates the history of tourism and reasons for its growth, continuing to analyse a type of tourism which became particularly significant in the latter half of the twentieth century, international mass tourism. This trend for domestic tourism continued for the first part of the twentieth century, to be succeeded by a second phase of mass tourism occurring after the Second World War, this time built upon travel with an international spatial perspective.
