Book excerpt: Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas - artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific - and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.