The Onset of Auto-tourism in Colonial Tunisia

Abstract

This article relates the genesis of auto-tourism in Tunisia during the early colonial period and analyses the various stages it went through. The paper also explores the main features of this new travel/tourist activity and how it was introduced, represented, promoted and developed. This essay is a historical analysis of auto-tourism, a new socio-cultural phenomenon, which reached French colonial Tunisia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and affected Tunisian society and culture in a variety of ways. The paper equally shows how the automobile contributed over time to the development of Tunisian tourism more generally. The history of tourism in North Africa is awaiting further case studies on the growth of auto-tourism, a highly neglected aspect in the historical literature, because of the significance of auto-tourism to the long-term socio-economic and cultural evolutions of the region.