The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that…

The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet airliner arrived in 1949. A lot of this is down to WW2. /1 https://t.co/wQjQtNk2VQ

WW2 had created huge industrial capacity that had to be re-purposed when the war ended. Some of it went on to create industrial agriculture. Jet engines were developed in the same war, and commercial aviation seemed an obvious spin-off. And here we are. /2

Here's where you can have fun with the usual supply and demand nonsense. People of course travelled internationally before we had jets. They mostly used boats. But very, very few bothered. Tiny demand. It was a hassle, and you needed months of free time to make it possible. /3

Supply creates demand. True for roads, true for water, and here true for travel. It wasn't that the jet airliner finally satisfied 'latent demand' for international travel. There was no latent demand, you can't desire something that doesn't exist. /4

International travel was and is an *invented desire*. A real desire now, but invented. Not some intrinsic thing about humans. Again it had about 99% to do with re-purposing industrial war machinery, and 1% with tourism. /5

And look at the graph. Who's doing this travelling? Overwhelmingly it's Europeans, still today. Growth in other areas, but this shift to global culture has been heavily driven by Europe. Only about 2-4% of the world population actually do this. /6 https://t.co/Yxwc7fUxO0

It's a highly elite activity, whereas the travel fanatics will have you believe this is some great latent nomad fantasy shared by all the world's people. Nearly everybody in the world isn't doing it. A fine definition of privilege is people not even knowing this. /7

The Europeans also invented territorial culture. Look at a map of their territory. Most of their history is fights over those borders, over territory. Their wars are nearly always about territory. Most modern empires came out of this place too. /8 https://t.co/d0QuQSHKo3

These (mostly tiny) countries have always looked to expand by accumulating territory elsewhere. Travel is that old passion now transformed into recreation. I don't think we can or should ignore how deep this obsession with accumulating territory has been, for Europeans. /9 https://t.co/t5igptartj

And nor should we ignore this origin of our own passion for travel. This desire is being exported to more and more parts of the world. To me it's the worst aspect of European culture, now spreading globally. To possess places, locations. To accumulate them. /10

A promiscuity of place. Place is a relationship, not an experience. It's peoples' HOMES. We're masters at dispossession, we did it in empires and wars, and now we do it for recreation. You may think that continuity is forced, but look at the number of nations now dependent.../11

...on our 'tourist dollars' to even survive. They've had to turn their original dispossession, through empire and wars, into income. Just one more layer of dispossession. The West will not understand itself until it understands its perverse relationship with place. /12

Always taking off, never land-ing. Never being grounded, anywhere. Trashing its own lands and now everybody else's too. Driving all the other lifeforms who share place to extinction. Until it makes PLACE, its OWN and others', sacred again, it will be a curse on the planet. /end