European tourists approached the real Orient searching for exhibition-like structure

Evidence

This notion of an ‘imaginary structure’ that exists before and apart from something called ‘external reality’, in the same way as an exhibit or a plan stands apart from the real world it represents, is what gives shape to the experience and understanding of objective people. It governs, in other words, the strange anthropology in which we inhabitants of the world-as-exhibition believe. In order to anthropologise a little further our thinking about the person and the world, I am now going to move on to consider what happened to the nineteenth-century European who travelled to the Middle East. The Orient, after all, was the great ‘external reality’ of modern Europe – the most common object of its exhibitions, the great signified. By the late 1860s Thomas Cook, who had launched the modern tourist industry by organising excursion trains with the Midland Railway Company to visit the Crystal Palace exhibition, was offering excursions to visit not exhibits of the Orient but the real thing. Yet as we will see, European visitors would arrive in the Orient looking for the same kind of structure ‘raised in the imagination’. They would come expecting to find a world where a structure or meaning exists somehow apart, as in an exhibition, from the ‘reality’ of things-in-themselves. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 103

Categorization

• SEED: The Thomas Cook pivot—from exhibiting the Orient to selling excursions to the ‘real’ one—is a sharp angle for an essay on how tourism inherits colonial exhibition logic, the packaged ‘real thing.’
• CANDY: Thomas Cook launched modern tourism by running excursion trains to the Crystal Palace exhibition, then pivoted to selling trips to the actual Orient.