Lawrence [D.H.], for all his bitterness against post-war England, was not just escaping. His travels were energized by a passionate quasi-primitivist quest; he longed for a truer, simpler, more intense way of being, and was endlessly disappointed. Lawrence loathed modern hybridity; he wanted to seek out the pure essence of the people he visited.

Freya Stark, like others in the twenties and thirties, mocks those who continue to dream of exotic otherness. Yet if travel writing had become deliberately anti-romantic, it was in addition anti-heroic.

Travel writers became increasingly aware that they were describing fragmented, hybridized cultures, the shabby remnants of the tapestry of otherness their predecessors had woven.

This sense of an older, more aesthetic world in the throes of decay was not entirely new. Mary Louise Pratt has argued that travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘produced’ “the rest of the world” for Europeans’, but creeping into the travel writing of the late nineteenth century and beyond is the fear that ‘the rest of the world’ is losing its distinctive otherness, and the perturbing recognition that the lines of demarcation between Europe and the other are becoming disturbingly blurred.

She [Edith Wharton] negotiates her 1905 travel book, Italian Backgrounds, by insisting that Italy is ‘a foreground and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy’, such, of course, as herself.

Yet there are two features of Belloc’s book which, if not new, were to become increasingly pervasive. Firstly, there is his desire to put a distance between himself as traveler and the burgeoning droves of tourists. Belloc’s book is an account of a pilgrimage on foot through Germany, France, and Italy to Rome, and he is dismissive of the tourists that he sees on a passing train, who ‘seemed to [him] common and worthless people, and sad into the bargain.’ Such dismay at the democratization of travel was widely shared among travel writers, many of whom showed the same suspicion of popular travel that modernists exhibited towards popular culture in general.

Evelyn Waugh protested later that Belloc had invented a new and most uncongenial kind of modern traveler, one who insists on avoiding modern comfort precisely because it is there. ‘All the world is my oyster’, Waugh quotes Belloc as saying, ‘since men made railways and gave me leave to keep off them’. But traveling in ostentations discomfort was not new – Robert Louis Stevenson had, one could argue, invented that kind of European traveler much earlier, and certainly Victorian African travelogues describe with relish, and one suspects embellishment, the hardships endured, though admittedly the possibility of modern travel was not for them on offer.

For Blunt, imposing Western modernity only brings degradation and misery.

The period from 1880 to 1940 saw this change take place. There was a move – as in imaginative literature – from the detailed, realist text, often with an overtly didactic or at any rate moral purpose, to a more impressionistic style with the interest focused as much on the travelers’ responses or consciousness as their travels.

“the habit of flux”

Dependent though colonial expansion was on technological advance, also fundamental to it was the belief in the moral and intellectual superiority of the white races. The later eighteenth and nineteenth century had seen the invention of distinct national identities, the establishment of firm racial hierarchies, the consolidation of narratives of progress, development, scientific advance, and white supremacy; those were the ideologies that made imperialism possible. Yet the very process of colonization meant that these clear distinctions began to dissolve: transculturation, miscegenation, the barbarism necessary to impose rule – all conspired to make the question of which was the savage and which the civilized a disturbing one to answer.

Much of British travel writing in these decades [1880-1940] emerged, in one way or another, out of the possibilities opened up by . . . colonial and trade development.