1 Citation: Bianchi, Raoul (2014) ‘Towards a Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited’, in Sharpley, Richard and Telfer, David J. (eds.) Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues. Channel View Publications, pp. 287-331. http://www.channelviewpublications.com/display.asp?k=9781845414733 Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited Raoul V. Bianchi Development must start from the actual conditions and social practices of each people. (Barratt Brown 1995) Introduction Despite the continued expansion and diversification of international tourism worldwide and its consolidation as one of the world’s leading economic sectors, the international political economy of tourism has yet to achieve the prominence it (arguably) did during an earlier epoch of tourism development studies and continues to remain conspicuous by its absence in the wider development literature, with one or two noteworthy exceptions (Chin 2008; Clancy 1998, 2008; Ferguson, 2010). As argued elsewhere (see Bianchi, 2009), this deficit can be attributed to a number of factors, including, the fact that tourism has predominantly been observed from applied, business-oriented perspectives, as well as, more recently, the turn away from what are loosely described as ‘structuralist’ analyses of tourism, towards those which tend to foreground the analysis of discourse and culture over that of conflict and inequality rooted in economic and political relations of power, otherwise referred to as the ‘critical turn’ in tourism studies (see Ateljevic et al. 2007). Whilst the preponderance of prescriptive and technical studies into tourism's economic impact upon host societies provided some insight into the overall quantitative value of tourism to host economies, during an earlier period of tourism development research (Bryden 1973; Cleverdon 1979), they did little to reveal the