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Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook was a 19th century English pioneer in the tourism industry. He organized the first ever excursion train to transport over 500 people to a conference, which helped launch his tourism business. With his son John, they founded Thomas Cook & Son which became a major global tourism company with offices worldwide. While early tours focused on social improvement, later tours led by his son became more commercial and oriented toward wealthy tourists in places like Egypt and India, reflecting Britain's growing imperial influence.

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Dareen Cueto
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488 views3 pages

Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook was a 19th century English pioneer in the tourism industry. He organized the first ever excursion train to transport over 500 people to a conference, which helped launch his tourism business. With his son John, they founded Thomas Cook & Son which became a major global tourism company with offices worldwide. While early tours focused on social improvement, later tours led by his son became more commercial and oriented toward wealthy tourists in places like Egypt and India, reflecting Britain's growing imperial influence.

Uploaded by

Dareen Cueto
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THOMAS COOK

Thomas Cook (1808-92), a book salesman, Baptist preacher and tract distributor
of Derbyshire, was a pioneer in the tourist industry. The map discussed in this exhibit
was created by his company "Thomas Cook & Son," which is in its 175th year of
business today. 

According to Paul Smith, the company's archivist, Thomas Cook's son John was
the one that was more "commercially minded" and consequently "internationalized" the
company with offices in the US, Egypt and India. These are two of the over 10,000
brochures currently in the firm's archive.
Around 1874 English travel agent Thomas Cook introduced "circular notes." This
financial product became much better known through the American Express brand
of traveler's cheques which were introduced in 1891.

Thomas Cook, a book dealer, Baptist minister, and tract distributor from
Derbyshire, was encouraged to hire the Midland Counties Railway to transport more
than 500 temperance activists from Leicester to Loughborough and back for a delegate
conference in 1841. The first of many planned mass excursions that would follow, this
privately chartered excursion train quickly became the first to be publicly marketed.
Cook used his initiative and organizational abilities to organize an increasing number of
excursions that were more in demand, many of which were made possible by the
revolution in transportation technology. With the help of his son John Mason Cook,
Cook eventually founded the Thomas Cook & Son Company, which saw him rise to a
position of great power and influence that was almost equal to that of the government.
At some point, Cook started to take his enterprise outside of Europe, into America,
Egypt, and India. As he traveled outside of Europe and into the less developed
countries, the nature of his tours also underwent a significant change. This was largely
due to the influence of his more "commercially minded" son; his enterprise in Egypt, for
instance, was more commercialized, opulent, and ultimately imperial. While Thomas
Cook's early European tours in the 1950s and 1960s were intended to be democratic
and charitable endeavors, driven by an idea of moral and social improvement and
extending "the privilege of upper classes to the bourgeois and petit bourgeois of the
industrialized nations," in order for the tours to be "an agent of 'Human Progress,'" the
tours in the 1880s in the dependent nations and colonies of the British Empire reverted
to a rich man's business, a tourism for Aristocrats. By this time, Thomas Cook & Son
had become an institution of the British Empire, both representative of and crucial to the
operation of the empire and departing significantly from the moral and social principles
upon which the tours were originally founded. This latter form reinforced "rigidly
hierarchic distinctions between white ruling classes and colored subject peoples; it [was]
entirely dedicated to the convenience and amusement of aristocrats and colonials."

Reference:

A Brief History of Tourism and Thomas Cook · "Cook's Plan of Bombay" - A Map By and
For the West · The Urban Imagination (harvard.edu)

Travel Agent Thomas Cook Introduces "Circular Notes", a Precursor of Traveler's


Cheques : History of Information

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