Five years ago, I became acquainted with the website SmartTraveller, hosted by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT. I’d received a last-minute invitation to join a group travelling to Borneo. My immediate response was to consult our big World Atlas (I’m old school with maps), because I didn’t even know where Borneo was. My next move was to look at the SmartTraveller site for safety advice. It was my first encounter with the four-tier system of safety ratings by which the Australian government ranks destinations around the world. 

Green means ‘exercise normal precautions, as you would at home’. Yellow means ‘exercise a heightened degree of caution’. Orange means ‘reconsider your need to travel’. And red means simply ‘do not travel’. When I went to the website in February 2015 the island of Borneo was coloured a mixture of green, yellow and orange, but our whole itinerary fell within the green and yellow parts. I was good to go! 

Back then, red was reserved for a few places so terrible and tragic that an ordinary traveller wouldn’t even consider going there – places like Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. Now, SmartTraveller has painted the whole world outside Australia red. 

To use a word we now hear constantly, it is unprecedented for the government to declare the whole world outside our borders a no-go area. But are there any precedents we can turn to for a sense of what this kind of shutdown might mean for the travel industry and for us as travellers?

The clearest precedent I can think of is the closure of continental Europe to British travellers during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Britain was at war with France almost continuously from 1792 to 1815, and during that time it was virtually impossible for members of the public to visit ‘the Continent’. Except for a brief respite during the Peace of Amiens in 1802-3, Europe was effectively off-limits for a whole generation of British travellers. 

That didn’t mean that the British didn’t travel at all. When they couldn’t go overseas, they started to travel more at home, finding beauty and interest in natural and cultural environments right on their doorstep.

As historian Rosemary Sweet writes on the British Library website:

‘The closure of much of continental Europe during the Napoleonic Wars forced a generation of travellers to discover their own country: domestic tourism, already well established, enjoyed an unprecedented boom, as the outpouring of tour guides, works of topography and topographical prints from this period suggest.’

It wasn’t that no one had ever travelled for pleasure within Britain before; rather, the inaccessibility of Europe heightened and concentrated an interest that already existed. Domestic travel itself wasn’t entirely new, but the boom in domestic travel was ‘unprecedented’. (There’s that word again!) 

The destinations that really took off in this domestic tourism boom were the Wye Valley on the English-Welsh border, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Scotland. Can you see what they have in common? They are – or at least they were – wild places, far from big cities, offering beautiful scenery as well as glimpses into deeply non-metropolitan ways of life, which were often savoured with a dash of Celtic exoticism. 

Whereas visitors to Europe on the Grand Tour wanted to see ancient ruins and great works of art, the domestic travel boom precipitated by Britain’s long-running war with France was more concerned with discovering picturesque scenes and scenery. Whereas the Grand Tour was essentially educational in orientation, the new domestic tourism focused on the search for sentimental experiences – for new feelings rather than new knowledge. Romantic art and literature had a lot to do with this, as they provided travellers with a new vocabulary for talking about the emotional effects of landscapes and remote places.

Jane Austen was well aware of that when, in chapter 27 of Pride and Prejudice (1813), she framed Elizabeth Bennet’s ecstatic response when invited by her aunt and uncle to accompany them on a ‘northern tour’. 

‘We have not determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “but, perhaps, to the Lakes.’

No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. ‘Oh, my dear, dear aunt,’ she rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’

Lizzie imagines that their trip will be all about seeing ‘lakes, mountains, and rivers’, a response typical of the new domestic tourism and very different from the focus on history and cultural monuments that characterised the European Grand Tour.

The travel restrictions caused by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had two lasting effects on the history of tourism. The generation-long ‘closure’ of Europe to British travellers led to a complete redrawing of the domestic tourist map, with new destinations being discovered and popularized that are still at the forefront of British tourism today. (Scotland and the Lake District are perfect examples.) And when the wars finally ended in 1815 and British travellers rushed back to the Continent in greater numbers than ever before, the terms of the overseas travel experience had changed forever. The exclusively male, aristocratic Grand Tour was dead. Now, travel was for all – for women, for families, for the middle class and even, increasingly, for the working class. Within a few decades the era of mass tourism had begun.

So, what can we look forward to when the world map on the SmartTraveller website eventually returns to being a collage of green, yellow and orange instead of its current red? I don’t think we can imagine yet what the structural shift in the travel industry will look like, but I believe there will be one, just as there was in the early nineteenth century.

In the mean time, domestic travel will be the winner. Although as I write this new internal border closures are being announced in Australia, as they have been in many other countries, once the worst of this crisis eases, it will be domestic destinations that reopen first. When that happens, let’s join Elizabeth Bennett in her rapturous response to the possibility of experiencing new scenes and say with her, ‘What delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour.’