2016
Working Paper
HBS Working Paper Series

Mapping the Economic Grand Tour: Travel and International Emulation in Enlightenment Europe

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:29

Abstract

As the itinerant wizard (technically one of the Maiar, if not the Istari) Gandalf wrote to the then domestically-inclined hobbit Frodo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Indeed, as the recent brouhaha over the “wanderlust gene” DRD4-7R testifies to, travel is a constant of human experience, inflected in myriad ways by history, literature, and life, from the Homeric epics and the Jungian archetype of “the wanderer” to Tripadvisor.com and Ibiza stag parties. People have traveled to learn, to conquer, to evangelize, in search of architectural inspiration and for reasons of health, not to mention because other places were “there,” in Edmund Hillary’s famous formulation, but within this spacious swath of human history my interest lies with a particular kind of purposeful travel that I would define as “economic,” by which I do not mean frugal or “low cost,” but pursued to improve the management of the material world—theoretically or practically, individually or collectively; more the Jesuit François Xavier d’Entrecolles discovering the secrets of Chinese porcelain in 1712 than, say, Ryanair.