Heritage tourism : the dawn of a new era?

For many years tourism has been one of the principal ways through which the relationship between heritage and globalisation is analytically articulated. Countless studies since the 1970s have considered the arrival of tourism as the precipitator of modernity, of modernisation and of widespread social transformation. There is little doubt this tradition of scholarship will continue to thrive and evolve. By way of a contribution to this research, this chapter sets out to illustrate why current debates in this field need to shift direction, and why frameworks which better reflect the realities of today's global tourism industry need to be developed, most notably ones which can better account for the ongoing rise of non-Western forms of tourism.