INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL HISTORIES OF

SOCIABILITIES, SPACES AND MOBILITIES

Colin Divall
In the rich global north we increasingly move ourselves and our things around, to
the point where it often seems as though achieving ever-higher levels of movement
has become central to what it means to be human. Certainly, being able to move as
and when we want, ideally at an ever-reducing financial cost, appears to be regarded
as close to a right in (post)industrial societies, and is an achievable aspiration for
the better-off in the more vigorous economies of the global south, as witnessed by
the rapidly growing usage there of automobiles and aeroplanes. Such movement
generates significant levels of well-being for many: and yet it also comes with huge
costs sometimes to those on the move, but less fairly to those people who do not
directly benefit, and to the environment. Richer people tend to move more and
further, and to suffer fewer of the immediate downsides of that movement such
as crashes, noise and air pollution; while the total greenhouse-gas emissions and
other environmental costs of all this rushing around are still probably increasing
globally despite the clever technology that delivers more kilometres travelled per
gram of CO2 released. Reconciling the demands of a growing global population
wanting (or having) to move more with the need rapidly to reverse greenhouse-gas
emissions and to spread the benefits as well as the costs of that movement is a huge
challenge that probably outweighs that of the global financial crisis.
What has this to do with this collection of essays on the cultural histories
of sociabilities, spaces and mobilities ? The desire to be sociable to relate to
others in ways that are friendly, companionable and (ideally) free of ulterior
motive both at the destination and even on the trip, is an important impulse
to travel and a very significant generator of trips; the dominance of particular
kinds of transport can have striking effects, for good or ill, on the kinds of spaces
in which people live and therefore on the possibilities for sociability. Thus this
book explores a few of the many ways in which, from mediaeval through to
(post)modern times in several parts of the world, peoples movement in, through

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and across spaces has shaped, and been shaped by, the ways in which they have
related sociably. While it would be ridiculous to suggest that the handful of
examples analysed here hold the key to any transition to new ways of moving and
being sociable, collectively these essays gesture towards the kind of history of the
longue dure that is needed to begin to make sense of how we find ourselves in
our present predicament and thus how we might collectively start to take charge
of the future. For while globalization involves new ways of socializing , especially
through the co-presence of individuals who are not physically proximate, we
should not dismiss the continuing significance of older ways in which peoples
motion has marked, and been marked by, their sense of location and the types of
sociable interactions thereby made possible. Moreover these mobilities, spaces
and sociabilities are all cultural processes: how we move often means more than
simply getting from A to B; similarly, the spaces in and through which we move,
socialize and dwell are bound up with all sorts of personal and communal values
and identities. Understanding what is new about these cultures of mobilities,
spaces and sociabilities and what, fundamentally, is not, is a small but important
part of locating ourselves more surely in the driving seat of history.
First: history as a resource for the present. Whether we are talking about
elites and experts politicians, policy-makers and analysts, pressure groups and
so on or that heterogeneous body the general public, our current behaviour
in relation to movement and sociability and our thinking about the future are
framed by often deep-set assumptions that are both the products of history and
partly sustained by the stories we tell today about that past. By understanding
how and why the past and our collective engagement with that past thus shape
the present, we acquire as citizens some of the knowledge needed to judge what
might be possible and indeed wise in an increasing complex and not entirely
predictable world of global and local flows and fluxes. Such a project raises questions of how the historian relates to power, be it that of governments, state or
international bureaucracies or corporations: power will always try to shape the
past to its interests, but is it possible to shift the terms of engagement more in
favour of the dispossessed and towards more equitable and sustainable systems
of motion and sociability ? Perhaps a history that shows how power in all its
interlocking forms has shaped todays global fluxes is more likely to engender
despair than hope, for these forces have apparently locked us into unsustainable ways of moving, so that it seems virtually impossible to conceive of a world
not dominated by the automobile, the aeroplane and the container ship. Yet
even as the past might appear as a straightjacket, history partly liberates us by
demonstrating just how quickly once-dominant transport systems can become
obsolete. Who would have predicted, say, as late as 1940 that within two decades
flying would have replaced oceanic shipping for many leisure trips? At the very
least then the history of movement shows that change is the ultimate reality so

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it would be foolish to assume we shall always have, or be able, to move in the

ways that we currently do. History can also reveal paths not taken, or taken and
then abandoned, that under the novel circumstances of the present might have
renewed potential: the electric vehicle, for instance.
This project requires a cultural history and, more specifically, a genealogy of
present-day mobilities, spaces and sociabilities. For a persons movement from
A to B becomes a kind of mobility once it is imbued with symbolic meanings
beyond the strictly functional. These meanings are not innocent: they are bound
up in all sorts of ways with the constitution of social power. Without committing this volumes contributors to a theoretical framing they might wish to
refuse, mobilities can be thought of as discourses in a broadly Foucauldian sense,
capturing the way in which both meaning (whether conveyed linguistically or
through material forms such as vehicles) and the material practices of movement are mutually constituted as well as inevitably shot through with power.
Mobility discourses have real implications for the prospects of any transition
to more equitable and sustainable ways of moving and socializing. For research
shows that peoples reluctance to, say, cut back on leisure flights or chose walking , cycling or public transport when these are viable alternatives to the car is
partly shaped by attitudes and expectations that have nothing directly to do with
the effectiveness or financial costs of one mode over another.1 For example, the
outcomes of Dutch initiatives promoting sustainable transport turned partly on
whether stakeholders felt that a project infringed upon established interests or
acquired rights like the freedom to move at will, or whether it fitted in with
wider social trends such as individualization or globalization.2
Scholars have long noted that physical mobility is shot through with normative meanings. For instance, as long ago as 1849 the historian T. B. Macaulay
argued that in the transition from feudal to early-modern English society every
improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially; he was tracing how the emerging notion of
citizenship was tied up with an individuals freedom of movement within the
boundaries of the nation-state.3 When scholars start looking, it is not hard to
find similar examples from much earlier.4 But it is likely that in terms of writing a
history, even one of the longue dure, that addresses todays political imperatives,
understanding the transition from the comparative stasis of feudal society to the
mobilities of the liberal nation-state and the hyper-mobility of todays post-societal world is more relevant at least in the rich north than what happened over
two millennia ago. In this context, Macaulay is also germane to my argument
about the importance of understanding how narratives about historical mobilities can later perhaps much later be remade and retold in pursuit of very
different social, political or corporate ends. For instance, from the last third of
the nineteenth century, Britains railway companies stripped Macaulays dictum

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of its historical specificity and used it to encourage travel on a scale that would
not otherwise have happened, much of it for leisure.5 Sedimented deep in the
collective (semi-)consciousness, such distorted readings of the past can remain
influential for many decades. For example, much of the rhetoric surrounding the
UK governments proposal in 2012 to build a high-speed railway assumed that
greater speed and more trips were almost unquestionably good, not least because
this would open up more opportunities for long-distance sociability.6
Given that mobility has acquired multiple scholarly meanings it is important to note that this volume only analyses sociabilities and, more generally, the
circulation of meanings that depended upon the physical shifting and meeting
of people and their things; face-to-face encounters, whether everyday or exceptional, complemented by exchanges through the likes of letters, photographs,
newspapers, guidebooks and so on. While this rules out important questions
about the ways in which telecommunication interacts with mobility and sociability, the volume would be unmanageable otherwise. In some ways, transport
would (and sometimes still does) serve as a better term here than mobility, were
it not for the fact that recently much academic usage has denied the richer, fuller
meanings suggested by the words etymology, wrongly construing transport to
be nothing but functional movement. Nevertheless the shift to the language of
mobilities does reflect a series of important conceptual and thematic developments in the way that historians and others with a scholarly interest in the past
analyse movement through space. As I have already indicated, mobility-cumtransport is framed as a material culture: although disciplinary boundaries are
fluid and becoming more so, this strong emphasis on materiality to some degree
distinguishes the historiography of mobilities and many of the essays here
from the study of travel writing (even when the embodied nature of the travelling
subject is fully acknowledged) with its rich analysis of the formation of subjectivities and identities. For a genealogy of mobility discourses must also comprehend
the meaning-laden realms of the infrastructures (vehicles as well as the more
conventionally understood fixed elements, such as roads and bridges) that made
transport possible, along with the patterns of embodied movement that shaped
the sociabilities and other modes of dwelling of mobile and static subjects.7
Comprehending the simultaneously meaning-laden and material/physical nature of the spaces in and through which mobilities are performed is also
critical to such a genealogy.8 For the purposes of this book it is useful to think
of two different if related kinds of social space, the micro-spaces in and by which
people moved typically, the vehicle or parts thereof, such as the compartment
of a railway coach and the comparatively static macro-spaces the landscapes
and places through and in which they moved or dwelt. Both offered opportunities for sociability, which in turn mutated along with developments in transport.
Thus for example, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has famously observed, the enforced
propinquity of strangers inside the compartment of a European railway coach

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engendered a different mode of sociability to that of the stage coach or country

wagon, with novel behaviour such as reading or staring out of the window providing people with an alternative to the conversation and physical jostling of the
older modes.9 Yet established sociabilities-on-the-move could survive, or even be
remade to accommodate novel forms of transport. For instance, the experience of
a crowded excursion train in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century often
owed more to the raucous forms of sociability associated with, say, the traditional
fair than the quiet decorum of the middle-class traveller described by Schivelbusch.10 Similarly with the macro-spaces of places and landscapes. The railways
merely metaphorical annihilation of space by time did nevertheless bring distant
locations much closer together for practical purposes, threatening the dominance
of forms of sociability and, more widely, communal senses of place that, because
most people had moved comparatively little and then at no faster than horse pace,
were overwhelmingly based upon propinquity. Travellers had always existed, of
course, but as several of the essays here point out, they were treated with suspicion
precisely because they did not conform to this dominant mode of sociability : the
stranger had to negotiate a temporary position in the local social order. Thus the
increasing scale, scope and pace of mobility from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century further eroded the significance of propinquity afforded by dwelling
in one place: as people started to live in one location and work, shop and play in
others, sociabilities became more fractured, with different modes appropriate to
the different spaces through which people passed and more or less temporarily
dwelt. But this did not mean that people necessarily valued older sociabilities any
the less, leaving open the possibility of critique and resistance to the apparently
ever-quickening pace and geographical fracturing of social life.
Collectively, we need to rethink our relationship to mobility in the twentyfirst century so that we can continue, as far as possible, to socialize and dwell in
places and landscapes in ways that we value and yet are more socially equitable
and ecologically sustainable. The essays in this collection do not claim to provide
answers from the past about how to do this, but they do help to give a deeper
and more nuanced appreciation of how history shapes the possibilities that are
open to us for the future. More particularly, they help us to understand how
and why certain combinations of sociability, space and mobility were valued
and others not, tracing todays dominant, capitalist modes of structuring this
relationship back to feudal society a time and place that, perhaps surprisingly,
can prove strikingly relevant today. Some of the contributors make explicit the
continuing influence the historical mobility discourses they analyse have on contemporary attitudes and practice: most do not, but the potential is always there,
and while in the end change will only be brought about through a combination
of collective politics and personal practice, without the insights of cultural history we make ourselves needlessly short-sighted.

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Scope and Structure of the Collection

All the chapters in this volume share a basic commitment to the mutual constitution of the meaning-laden realms of sociability, space and mobility. The three
contributions to the first section highlight how variously gender, race/ethnicity
and class structure this relationship. In the opening chapter, Virginia Scharff s
long sweep through nearly three centuries of the history of one location in the
south west of the USA, what is now Denver, Colorado, shows not just how radical
change can be but also how women-on-the-move have always shaped the ways in
which people have dwelt and lived sociably. Initially this is a story of the unsettling
of the static populations of the indigenous Cheyenne as in the eighteenth century
they adopted the European horse, and small-scale farming and localized hunting
gave way to the semi-nomadic search for bison and grazing. But as womens role
changed from matriarchal landowners and farmers to that of butchers and homemakers-on-the-move, they also took the opportunities presented by encounters
with other, incoming European populations: in Chapter 1 Scharff traces the
emergence of hybrid sociabilities built upon wider economic ties between the two
ethnic groups, a meeting of more-or-less equals, in terms of both gender and ethnicity. It was only with the arrival of the railroad that the Colorado plains started
to turn into the city of Denver, an important junction on the network; the railway
encouraged migrants to settle in concentrations around stations or depots. Just as
with the horse, the railroad presented once-migrant women with opportunities
as well as threats, refracted through the twin prisms of class and race/ethnicity :
for a minority of African-American women, Denver provided sociable dwelling
in a racially and economically mixed neighbourhood, an island of comparative
equality surrounded by the choppy seas of the otherwise segregated city. In the
twentieth century, the automobile enabled the still-greater racial and economic
segregation of Denver as city turned into suburban sprawl and satellite communities. But again, women sought and found opportunities to work and build a
home for themselves, families and others as they necessarily took to driving. For
Scharff, gendered automobility, just like the modes of mobility that preceded it,
was neither straightforwardly a positive nor a negative for women-on-the-move:
but their mobilities were a key to the ways in which people creatively dwelt in the
mutating spaces located between the mountains and the plains.
Margaret Walshs chapter expands Scharff s observations on automobility to
examine how womens use of the auto structured patterns of suburban sociability
in the USA throughout much of the twentieth-century. In Chapter 2 she argues
that womens unequal access to the family car or even that of a second vehicle was
a central factor in creating and sustaining patterns of suburban living that left
women comparatively isolated in social terms and economically at a disadvantage. However Walsh demonstrates that despite initial disparagement from the
male-dominated auto industry and salesforce, from the 1950s women became

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more auto-mobile as part of the wider struggle for gender equality and entry to
the workforce, to the point that by the turn of the century there were almost as
many women as men behind the wheel. Nevertheless, womens use of the car still
differs markedly from mens, reflecting and sustaining the ways in which gender
continues to inflect family life. She also points to the differences found between
women, structured by class, race/ethnicity and age. Despite these continuing
differences, Walsh concludes that once women in the USA have started to drive,
they are just as reluctant to abandon automobility as men; a somewhat dispiriting finding if the car is seen as part of the problem today.
Unsurprisingly, Gordon Pirie, in Chapter 3, focuses firmly on race as the primary factor structuring the relationship between sociability, space and mobility
across South Africa in the apartheid era. With the formal initiation of apartheid
in the late 1940s, the existing inequalities of access between the races to trams,
buses and trains based upon different levels of income hardened into theoretically sharp segregation. But in practice, within the micro-spaces of these vehicles
racially defined people rubbed up against each other in often sharp encounters.
These racialized sociabilities of everyday separation and conflict were mirrored
in the larger geographical divisions both between and within urban and rural
territories. The infamous rural Homelands divided South Africas pool of cheap
black labourers both spatially and socially from the white urban areas where they
toiled having made lengthy commutes by bus, while within the cities decades-old
and racially inscribed distinctions between residential areas sharpened still further. While these legally enforced divisions eventually disappeared along with the
wider disintegration of the apartheid regime, Pirie comes to rather gloomy conclusions about future prospects. For the ways in which racialized mobilities were
historically implicated in making and sustaining social divisions, particularly by
compromising the possibilities for inter- and non-racial forms of sociability and
identities, still structures much of the social, cultural and economic geography of
South African cities. These continuing divisions are exacerbated by the growing
dominance of automobility in post-apartheid South Africa ; a cocooned, individualized form of transport to which economically disadvantaged racial groups
have unequal access. Pirie hopes that the prospects for harmonious sociabilities
among and between racial groups will be enhanced if the political will can be
found to effect greater use of public transport and walking in the cities along
with the eventual creation of more densely populated and racially mixed residential spaces. But he recognizes that the deeply sedimented character of South
Africas mobility discourses make this a herculean task, especially as transport
has yet to excite the interest of political activists.
The second part explores how sociabilities within urban and peri-urban areas
in Europe and the Americas were transformed, in the imagination, in practice
or in both by the increasing speed, scale and scope of mobilities in the nine-

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teenth and twentieth centuries. In Chapter 4 Greet De Block focuses on the

blurring of urban/rural divisions and the creation of hybrid rurban sociabilities and landscapes in that part of Flanders bordering France over the century
from Belgiums emergence as a nation-state in the 1830s. The development of
a regional railway system was both a key to this process and a material expression of the spatially and socially orientated intentions of shifting combinations
of political, industrial and social-reform interests. Building railways risked a tension between a national infrastructure policy orientated primarily towards the
creation of Belgium as a modern, industrial state located in a transnational European economy and the more locally focused goals of regional interests seeking
economic and social advantage either for their part of Flanders or individual
locations within it. But broadly speaking, national and regional visions were
accommodated by first linking the principal urban settlements in Flanders into
the main-line system and then building a dense network of secondary light railways serving smaller communities and rural areas. National policy consistently
encouraged rural dwellers to use trains daily to access work in urban settlements
and, more occasionally, the wider cultural and social facilities of towns and cities, allowing labourers and their families to continue living in the countryside.
While in the twentieth century motorized road transport increasingly replaced
trains, the change merely deepened Flemings attachment to a distinctive pattern
of rurban sociability that seems likely to be prove a great obstacle to any future
attempt to reshape the relationship between transport and space.
The next two chapters explore the power that representations of mobilities
have on the way that sociability and communal identities play out in the urban
landscape. In Chapter 5, Dhan Zunino Singh analyses a range of popular and
elite conceptions from around the turn of the last century concerning the future
of transport in Buenos Aires. In part this is an exercise in recovering futures that
while they were at best realized only in part, functioned both then and potentially now as critiques of the modernist celebration of the ever-increasing pace
of urban circulation. As a vibrant, fast-developing city increasingly integrated
into the global economy, Buenos Aires looked to Europe and North America for
visions and practical guidance on how to overcome the worsening congestion
on the streets that was seen as blocking further expansion and modernization.
The dominant discourses emphasized the potential of new technologies, some of
them, such as elevated and underground railways, already tried and tested overseas, while others conjured up more or less fantastical visions of how the spaces
of circulation might be extended vertically, both into the air and ever-deeper
underground. Such imaginings desired a metropolis that would continue to
speed up precisely because impediments to circulation would disappear: sociability, and dwelling more generally, in such a place would be characterized by
an enervating sensory overload and anxieties generated by the kind of constant
flux of people-on-the-move that Georg Simmel was famously describing around

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11

this time. In sharp contrast, the utopian thinkers described in this essay sought,
partly through technological innovation, a deceleration of urban life and indeed
the dissolution of the large-scale metropolis, in order to secure greater opportunities for harmonious social life. Stefan Hhnes chapter likewise examines
the conflict between alternative visions of urban spaces and sociabilities, in this
case in New York during the 1970s. Here the citys subway system and the flows
of people through it were largely given, but the way in which the system was
represented visually in a new, highly abstract, modernist map became the flash
point for a long-running dispute over how New Yorkers wanted their city to
be portrayed, understood and dwelt in. Massimo Vignellis transit map of 1972
emphasized the subways routes and interconnections almost without reference
to the overlying urban landscape and places. Praised by some commentators for
easing the travellers task of negotiating the labyrinthine network, most New
Yorkers rejected the reduction of their city to a space of (potential) flows and
lobbied, ultimately successfully, for a new map that reinstated visual reminders
of the many varied places served by the subway. Thus, Hhne argues in Chapter
6, the new transit map became a key element in the rebranding and marketing of
New York as a diverse, pleasant place in which to live permanently or visit. Here
people power was arguably co-opted in some degree by corporations and the
municipality, but nevertheless it is clear that popular conceptions and representations of urban spaces have the potential to help reshape the lived reality in ways
that refuse modernitys headlong rush to ever-quickening circulation.
Heidi Seetzen addresses centrally the issue raised earlier about the ways in
which stories about the past shape our thinking about the future. She examines
in Chapter 7 the battle that started around the turn of the century between
property developers and local residents in Deptford, a disadvantaged London
district on the River Thames with long-standing maritime connections. Seetzen
argues that the sharp differences between the parties turned on radically different
conceptions of Deptford as a place and a community, and hence of the kind of
sociabilities and other modes of dwelling that should be provided for in the future.
In their struggle, residents used a particular reading which Seetzen is careful not
to characterize as authentic of Deptfords long past as a key place in enabling
the maritime flows of people and things that had formerly brought a measure of
prosperity to the area. While developers were willing to acknowledge this history, they wished to reduce it to little more than an aesthetic representation, of
historic buildings framing spaces for shopping and other kinds of consumption
based upon national and international brands. In contrast, residents drew upon
their understanding of Deptfords past as a vibrant, successful place to construct
an alternative vision that placed far more emphasis on riparian activities, such as
boat building and repairs, as the basis for economic and social renewal, activities
that would return much higher levels of prosperity to the local community.

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The final part turns to the more exceptional motions of pilgrims, travellers
and tourists, ranging in time from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century
and in space from Japan to the Atlantic via the Middle East and Europe. Chapters 8 and 9 address the role of mobility and sociability, both on the ground and
in the imagination, in shaping an inchoate sense of national identity. In Chapter
8 Emily Price takes a detailed look at the accounts of their experiences ostensibly
written by (or by the confidants of ) three late-mediaeval English pilgrims to the
Holy Land. In this feudal period, travel over such long distances was, of course,
exceptional, not only in the sense that it was unattainable by the vast majority
but also that it was not always undertaken even by those with the means. The
importance for contemporaries of these accounts therefore lay as much, if not
more in the opportunities they offered vicariously to experience pilgrimage as
in their potential as guidebooks for other, future travellers. But in both cases
the message was as much secular as spiritual; the content as much empirical and
ethnographic as transcendental. Since pilgrimage involved lengthy travel across
spaces and to places where to be mobile was to invite suspicion and distrust,
pilgrims had to negotiate safe passage: while this involved accommodation with
local customs, food and other aspects of sociability, it also required a spiritual
dialogue with foreigners alien beliefs. Yet contrary to the modernist mantra that
travel broadens the mind, this simultaneously material and spiritual encounter
served primarily to confirm a sense of English (and, more strictly, English Christian) identity among both actual and imaginary pilgrims. Similarly, in Chapter
9, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that an important function of travel literature in
early-modern Japan, itself a reflection of increasing levels of elite and non-elite
mobility associated with the seventeenth-century Tokugawa shogunate (military
government), was to allow sedentary participation in tours around the archipelago, thereby forging locations and topography into places and landscapes loaded
with historical meanings that both legitimized the political regime and afforded
a sense of proto-national identity. In this regard the role of popular mobilities
of the imagination did not rely on literal movement through foreign lands and
negotiations with foreign sociabilities, but nevertheless Chinese civilization and,
more particularly, Chinese models of travel writing, served as a marker of the
Other against which the emerging space and culture of Japan could be positioned as the leading power in eastern Asia.
In Chapters 10 and 11, Ulrike Krampl and Kevin James ask how and why
sociability was forged between strangers engaging in otherwise very different
forms of mobility and in very different spaces. Krampl addresses the challenges of
social control posed by increasing levels of mobility in early-modern France. She
argues, in Chapter 10, that hospitality developed from the seventeenth century as
a crucial set of ritualized practices that allowed foreign travellers and inhabitants
in the communities through which they passed to codify each other in social and

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cultural terms, and hence to relate to each other harmoniously. The key to acceptance through mutual trust and respect, even on a temporary basis, was the gift:
the performance of acts that pleased the host in return for food and accommodation. However by the eighteenth century, hospitality was becoming increasingly
commodified in the emerging market economy. Nevertheless, precisely because
free markets required more travel by strangers, the unknown traveller became an
object of greater suspicion, scrutiny and state control: the need to prove oneself
as trustworthy to those offering sustenance had not diminished, and Krampl
suggests that this might well remain true in some measure today. By the latter
half of the nineteenth century, travellers, or at least some of them, had become
established as tourists reliant upon individuals and organizations to provide
the commercial services enabling the consumption of places and landscapes. In
Chapter 11 Kevin James delineates how traditional modes of transport, notably
the horse-drawn jaunting car, were combined with modern vehicles and facilities such as trains and hotels to construct a day tour around Killarney, a remote
part of south-western Ireland. The Killarney tour was a quintessentially modern experience of mobility in which the forms of sociability into which tourists
entered with their guides, drivers and other providers as well as each other were
crucial to their experience of the local landscape, food and customs as timeless
and authentic. But the structure and practice of the tour was always contested:
comparatively large-scale commercial tourist operators such as Thomas Cook
attempted to wrest control of service provision from local entrepreneurs, while
tourists would repeatedly try to shake off the advances of opportunistic hawkers
and vendors. Yet for over sixty years the traditional itinerary of the Killarney day
tour survived, thanks in no small measure to the degree to which local forms of
transport, customs, food and so on had become sedimented in the imagination as
key elements in the appreciation of the landscape. Sometimes the appropriation
of tradition can be turned to the advantage of the relatively powerless.
By the mid-twentieth century, big business was more firmly in control of
how tourists from capitalist societies related to each other on the move. Food
plays a key role in Birgit Braaschs analysis in Chapter 12 of how the oceanic
liner companies and airlines competed for trans-Atlantic tourists in the thirty
years after the Second World War. The meals served on board were central to
the way in which passengers experienced both their time in the vehicles and the
oceanic space they were traversing. There were however differences between
the two modes. The liners slower speed and superior facilities allowed for more
luxurious meals that presented greater opportunities for mixing with fellow
tourists. The choice of food and drink served as well as the manner in which it
was cooked, using the latest technologies, also reflected the fact that liners were
highly national spaces; while the frequent taking of meals imposed on the day
a structure that diverted attention from the comparatively leisurely pace of the

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voyage. On aircraft, meals were served to passengers in their seats and so did not
afford much sociability with fellow travellers. And while airliners were just as
much technological symbols of national pride as liners, the way in which food
refracted this was more nuanced: there was a greater emphasis on the modernity
of the means by which it was prepared, and less on the national characteristics of
the menu. The timing of airline meals was also placed in a clearer and more direct
relationship to the oceanic geography, drawing passengers attention to the
speed with which the Atlantic was being crossed. By the 1970s, airline meals had
largely lost any connotations of luxury they might once have enjoyed, and Western tourists choice of how to cross the ocean had come down to that between
speed and cost on the one hand and the luxury of slow travel on the other. Nevertheless this was a considerably greater range than was available in the command
economies of eastern Europe, where tourism was heavily shaped by the state. In
Chapter 13 Adelina Stefan traces how the hesitant growth of automobility in
Romania from the 1960s gave people the opportunity to break free of the statesanctioned patterns of domestic and international tourism associated with train
and bus travel. This story is largely one of the struggle ordinary people had with
shortages and restrictions of vehicles, fuel and infrastructure (roads, service
stations and accommodation) and the inconsistencies of state policy towards
car-based tourism. Nevertheless, despite these practical problems Stefan shows
that the attractions of automobility and the individual or at any rate, family
orientated practice of touring this allowed were as strong under communism as
in any capitalist society: equally, the car was just as firmly established as a symbol
of freedom, with consequences that are readily apparent today on the increasingly congested roads of eastern Europe.
The final chapter, Jennifer Simes study of the pilgrimage to Santiago de
Compostela in Spain over the last three-quarters of a century, returns us to
the relationship between sacred and secular voyaging raised by Prices analysis of some four hundred years earlier. Chapter 14 provides an opportunity to
reflect briefly upon some of the continuities as well as the changes in the mutual
shaping of sociabilities, spaces and mobilities over this long period. Of course,
modern pilgrims could travel in ways undreamt of by their predecessors; Sime
examines the ways in which first, during the Spanish civil war, the train and later,
in the 1950s, the bus shaped pilgrims experience of their movement towards
(and away from) Compostela, of their fellow travellers, and of the landscapes
through which they passed. But for all these sharp differences from the experience of late-mediaeval pilgrims, in each case an ostensibly spiritual journey
towards a centuries-old religious destination also powerfully served to create
and sustain very particular senses of national identity: Christian Englishness in
the fifteenth century and subtly different inflections of a hispanicized catholicfascist one in the mid-twentieth. And Simes analysis of todays valorization of

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walking as a supposedly more authentic mode of pilgrimage, one that commands

respect because it requires more effort, also reminds us of the futile character
of much mobility, both then and now. For as Ja Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubis
have argued, travel and travel writing in the Western tradition from at least the
mediaeval to the present sits along a continuum defied by two poles: the one
expressing a transcendental vision of pilgrimage as the attainment of spiritual
fulfilment at the journeys end; and the other capturing the sense in which all
travel is open-ended, frustrating and disappointing because the very act of moving through foreign lands and encountering foreign people dissolves any sense
of sufficient, let along complete achievement at each and every resting point
the destination is endlessly deferred, the traveller is always moving and becoming, never dwelling and being. For Elsner and Rubis, modern travel writing is
overwhelmingly a literature of disappointment expressing the impossibility of
finding not only any kind of spiritual fulfilment but also that of authenticity in
cultural encounters.11 So too it proves with Fillipo, a young man driven to walk
to Santiago partly in order through spiritual immersion to escape, albeit temporarily, capitalisms relentless imperative to consume: however great the physical
and emotional pain of this ambulatory pilgrim there is, ultimately, no release
from desire because even God proves unattainable. At which point we should
ask ourselves again: how much mobility and of what kinds do we really need to
be sociable and thus fully human?

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