Travelling for its own sake is a recent idea. For most of history, people moved to trade, to fight, to worship, to flee or to find work, and anyone travelling without one of those reasons was regarded as suspicious rather than adventurous.
This is the narrative version. The dated version is in the timeline.
Trade and pilgrimage
The first long-distance networks were commercial. The Silk Roads moved goods, ideas and disease between China and the Mediterranean for well over a thousand years, and the people on them were merchants rather than travellers. The Incense Route through Arabia made Petra rich. The Indian Ocean monsoon trade connected East Africa, Arabia, India and Southeast Asia on a seasonal wind cycle.
Pilgrimage was the first mass movement of ordinary people for a non-economic reason, and it built the first travel infrastructure: hospices, waymarked routes, guidebooks and souvenir industries. The Hajj has moved comparable numbers for fourteen centuries.
The great pre-modern travel writers were nearly all working within one of these frames. Ibn Battuta covered perhaps 120,000km across three decades in the fourteenth century, starting as a pilgrim. Marco Polo travelled as a merchant. Xuanzang walked from China to India for Buddhist texts.
Exploration, and what it cost
From the fifteenth century, European states sent expeditions to find routes around the world, and the results reshaped the planet — the Columbian exchange of crops, animals and diseases; the transatlantic slave trade; and the colonisation of most of the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
It is worth being straightforward about this: the age of exploration was not a travel movement. It was a conquest, and a substantial number of the places in this guide are shaped by what it did to them.
The Grand Tour
From the seventeenth century, wealthy young northern Europeans spent one to four years travelling to France and Italy, ostensibly for education. It created the first genuine tourist economy — guides, souvenir painters, ruins maintained for visitors — and the idea that seeing places improves a person.
The railway and Thomas Cook
The nineteenth century made travel possible for people who were neither wealthy nor confident.
Railways moved large numbers cheaply. Thomas Cook’s first excursion in 1841 carried 500 temperance campaigners eleven miles; within thirty years he was running tours up the Nile, having invented the hotel coupon and the pre-paid itinerary.
Murray and Baedeker invented the modern guidebook in the 1830s and 40s, and with it the star rating — which standardised what people went to see and created the tourist itinerary as a thing that exists. See how the guidebook was invented.
Paid holidays had to be legislated: France in 1936, Britain in 1938, and never federally in the United States.
The jet age
The Boeing 707 in 1958 and the 747 in 1970 collapsed the cost per seat on long routes. The package holiday put the Mediterranean within reach of northern European workers and transformed those coastlines within fifteen years.
Deregulation — the US in 1978, Europe through the 1990s — produced the low-cost carrier, the city break, and a volume of movement that no previous era approached.
Now
Something over a billion international arrivals a year, which is roughly a hundred times the figure for 1950. That growth has brought real income to places that had none, and it has produced overtourism, housing displacement and an aviation emissions problem that remains unresolved.
The pattern through all of it is constant: each expansion of travel to a new group of people is met by the previous group complaining that the new arrivals are spoiling it. That complaint was made about the railway excursionists, the package tourists, the backpackers and now the influencers, and it has never once described anything other than status.