Facebook X YouTube Instagram TikTok NetGalley
Google Books previews are unavailable because you have chosen to turn off third party cookies for enhanced content. Visit our cookies page to review your cookie settings.

To Hell With Paradise (Paperback)

A History Of The Jamaican Tourist Industry

Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: Pitt Latin American Series
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822958239
Published: 30th July 2003
Casemate UK Academic

Please note this book may be printed for your order so despatch times may be slightly longer than usual.

in_stock

£40.00


You'll be £40.00 closer to your next £10.00 credit when you purchase To Hell With Paradise. What's this?
+£4.99 UK Delivery or free UK delivery if order is over £40
(click here for international delivery rates)

Order within the next 11 hours, 49 minutes to get your order processed the next working day!

Need a currency converter? Check XE.com for live rates



In the course of the nineteenth century, Jamaica transformed itself from a pestilence-ridden \u201cwhite man\u2019s graveyard\u201d to a sun-drenched tourist paradise. Deftly combining economics with political and cultural history, Frank Fonda Taylor examines this puzzling about-face and explores the growth of the tourist industry into the 1990s. He argues that the transformations in image and reality were not accidental or due simply to nature\u2019s bounty. They were the result of a conscious decision to develop this aspect of Jamaica\u2019s economy.Jamaican tourism emerged formally at an international exhibition held on the island in 1891. The international tourist industry, based on the need to take a break from stressful labor and recuperate in healthful and luxurious surroundings, was a newly awakened economic giant. A group of Jamaican entrepreneurs saw its potential and began to cultivate a tourism psychology which has led, more than one hundred years later, to an economy dependent upon the tourist industry.The steamships that carried North American tourists to Jamaican resorts also carried U.S. prejudices against people of color. \u201cTo Hell with Paradise\u201d illustrates the problems of founding a tourist industry for a European or U.S. clientele in a society where the mass of the population is poor, black, and with a historical experience of slavery and colonialism. By the 1990s, tourism had become the lifeblood of the Jamaican economy, but at an enormous cost: enclaves of privilege and ostentation that exclude the bulk of the local population, drug trafficking and prostitution, soaring prices, and environmental degradation. No wonder some Jamaicans regard tourism as a new kind of sugar.Taylor explores timely issues that have not been previously addressed. Along the way, he offers a series of valuable micro histories of the Jamaican planter class, the origins of agricultural dependency (on bananas), the growth of shipping and communications links, the process of race relations, and the linking of infrastructural development to tourism. The text is illustrated with period photographs of steamships and Jamaican tourist hotels.

There are no reviews for this book. Register or Login now and you can be the first to post a review!

Other titles in the series...

Other titles in University of Pittsburgh Press...