ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the provision of food, shelter and protection figured into historical narratives of travel. Travellers often described an acute sense of vulnerability and their reliance on the goodwill of strangers. Writers grappled with ideas of hospitality as transhistorical, transnational and unlimited in supply when they encountered forms which were contingent not only on specific circumstances, but also upon explicit and implicit codes, and role-performances of ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. These dimensions of hospitality often suppressed, but did not extinguish, a cash nexus, and sometimes served as a foil for nostalgic accounts of hospitality in its most primitive, and purest, forms.
