Partners in Pleasure: State and Private Capital in the Making of Modern Mediterranean Tourism

This dissertation explores the development of tourism in the interwar eastern Mediterranean. It argues that the forging of networks of state officials and private commercial partners in the interwar years provided a critical foundation for the growth of tourism in the post-WWII period. The dissertation examines the case studies of tourism development in British Colonial Cyprus, Fascist Italian Colonial Rhodes, and the Greek nation-state. Each chapter draws on a diverse archival and printed primary source base from official government, corporate, and private bureaucratic records and travel literature. This dissertation prompts a reconsideration of the chronology of modern tourism development in the twentieth-century Mediterranean.