A people's history of leisure studies: Colonial pedagogies, touring empires Rasul Mowatt * Departments of American Studies and Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, 107 S. Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405, United States of America article info abstract Article history: Received 12 June 2021 Received in revised form 13 June 2022 Accepted 20 June 2022 Available online xxxx Handling Editor: Donna Chambers The colonial history and realities have not only impacted the peoples of the world, but also the very geography in which we inhabit. The imprint of the British Empire is one that has had the most lasting imprint of all other Empires. This is where cultural artifacts and historical objects play a role. As a cultural studies situated essay, this discussion considers the function of An ABC for Baby Patriots and the activities of Thomas Cook & Son agency in their role of aiding and per- petuating imperialism. In our contemporary period of accurate and inaccurate calls for decolo- nization, objects of colonialism have become important objects of evidence to the ubiquity of brutality of the entire endeavor of colonialism. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: An ABC for Baby Patriots Thomas Cook & Son Colonialism Decolonization Post-colonial theory Imperialism Introduction Stuart Hall (1991) famously noted that, People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centu- ries…I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself…Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity—I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they cannot get through the day without a cup of tea? [Where does it come from? Ceylon/Sri Lanka, India. (p. 48–49)] But why is this relevant to contemporary tourism studies? We are at a point in Stuart Hall's conjunctures that the coloniality of the past and present are coming to bear on our identity, actions, and the geographies we hold dear. Who we are, what we say we are, and what we want to be are bounded up in a struggle against colonial regimes of power that in many cases continue to sub- jugate. The very tourist gaze that has long since been an area of study and criticism should be considered as a reflection of those regimes rather than merely a phenomenological outgrowth of modern dominance and discrimination (Urry & Larsen, 2011). What is a conjuncture? It is an examination of the present that is firmly situated within a socio-political-historical context that comes from the past, a past. But this is not merely a historical reflection to inform a present. A conjuncture is the steady standing on guard for the political threats that are emerging in a particular way to take advantage of a particular type of opportunity. Annals of Tourism Research 96 (2022) 103462 * Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, College of Natural Resources & Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University E-mail address: rasul_mowatt@ncsu.edu (R. Mowatt). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103462 0160-7383/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Annals of Tourism Research journal homepage: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/annals-of- tourism-research