The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Jewett’s review of The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.
ON 24 SEPTEMBER 2022, THE POST-TROPICAL STORM FIONA ravaged Prince Edward Island’s (PEI’s) tourist landscape. Questions arose concerning whether this type of extreme but increasingly common climate change-based weather event would become part of the Island’s future “summer trade” and what consequences might be in store for all those linked to this industry as producers and consumers.[1] These types of questions are not new for those living, working, and playing on PEI. The work of Alan MacEachern and Edward MacDonald in The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island provides an entertaining and enlightening analysis of how to situate this recent devastation and its alteration of iconic seascapes, landscapes, attractions, and experiences into a wider understanding of Island life and tourism.[2] This book is a fitting next chapter both to the authors’ previous collaboration on Island marine transportation and its connections to islandness – an island’s otherness or distinctiveness from the mainland – and a growing tourism industry as well as to their projects exploring the Island’s stories through its national park, experiments in sustainable living, fishing, and aquaculture.[3] Summer Trade thoughtfully traces the evolution of the relationships between Islanders – from private individuals to government officials – and those who “come from away” across the range of Island environments.
Unlike the authors, I did not grow up on PEI.I am from “away.” I am one of the many whose family’s traditions included summer vacations on Epekwitk(Mi’kmaq for “laying in the water”)– this advertised“Garden of the Gulf” – only to realize that two weeks every year was not enough time, and so our family bought land and built a cottage. I have been part of the “summer trade” for most of my life. Reading MacEachern and MacDonald’s fascinating history of tourism on Prince Edward Island not only transported me back to meaningful vacation memories of attractions, beaches, and experiences, but also pulled back the curtain for me on the complexities and fragilities of creating the tourism industry that dominates so much of PEI landscapes and life. This book is a valuable addition to any academic’s library with an interest the histories of tourism, Atlantic Canada, leisure, environment, and so much more; but it also finds an audience with Islanders and Island tourists who will undoubtedly read, in great detail, about familiar people and places and have a chance to reflect on them in a new light.
Summer Trade is a sweeping and yet very detailed history of tourism on PEI. Though Mi’kmaw contributions and the racialized dimensions of Island tourism are discussed throughout, this is a history of predominantly white tourists and tourism providers.It encompasses the first travel writings that mention the Island’s pleasing natural environments as suitable travel destinations in the latter half of the 19th century through to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of climate change for the future of this vital industry. Throughout, the reader is treated to an overarching narrative of human/nature relationships made visible and meaningful through the stories of individual characters and organizations that help personalize the broad history. The vividness of this history is also constructed through a plethora of postcards, advertisements, drawings, photographs, and memorabilia throughout the book and that bring Island moments, real and imaginary, to life. The core of the book covers five themes that are key to understanding the foundations and transformations of the Island’s summer trade that weave themselves throughout the chronological chapters that detail the rich, complex, and often contested history of Island tourism. The book’s five themes are the island imagined, destinations are not destined, professionalization, “hospitality,” and the summer trade.
The narrative begins with an informative introduction on the nature of tourism and how wider historiographies and theoretical approaches fit with PEI experiences and then dives into the five key themes of the book. The first theme – the island imaged – meditates on the stable and persistent image presented to tourists by PEI producers and consumers during the last 150 years, particularly surrounding its islandness and the pastoral inspiration of its landscapes and stereotyped bucolic lifestyles. The second theme rightly argues that tourism and its forms are products of work and never inevitable realities. They are contingent – dependent upon the layers of events, daily actions, and decisions of people who might influence everything from the rise of beach culture on the island to the placement of the national park site to whether a depiction of Anne of Green Gables suitably fits into her established tourist persona. Professionalism of the tourist trade is the book’s third theme. Multiple examples throughout the book illustrate the subtle, or not so subtle, roles private enterprises and government/state actors had in the evolution of the summer trade. They left nothing to chance in building their perceived way forward for organizational arrangements, accommodation models, infrastructure, attractions, rating and licensing systems, and marketing imagery and strategies that would best support and increase the number of visitors.[4] Of course, these guiding hands did not always guide successfully nor with everyone’s support, as becomes evident through the authors’ fourth theme – “hospitility” – the “local ambivalence, displeasure or outright hostility towards tourists, tourism, and the promotion of tourism.”[5] While many Islanders saw the benefits of tourism and actively engaged in the developing industry, many also were unhappy with decisions made by the private-public goliath that built resorts, plotted parks, and designed hotels that would, supposedly, bring in visitors who were promised very specific Island experiences. The summer trade is the fifth and final theme of the book. This theme highlights the all-encompassing nature of tourism on the Island. The authors point out that the nature of tourism was about the give and take: those interactions between host and visitor and the transformations to Island environments and people because of those transactions.[6] These themes weave their web through five chapters, each of which traces efforts to manage and shape Island tourism – and responses to those efforts – during sequential time periods.
[1] Nicola MacLeod, “P.E.I. is Gearing up for its First Post-Fiona Tourism Season: A Lot has Changed.” CBC News,1 June 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/changed-by-fiona-tourism-1.6854223.
[2] Alan MacEachern and Edward MacDonald. The Summer Trade: A History of Tourism on Prince Edward Island (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
[3] Other works by MacEachern and MacDonald that focus on Prince Edward Island include another joint work – MacEachern and MacDonald, “Rites of Passage: Tourism and the Crossing to Prince Edward Island,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 49,no. 99 (June2016): 289-306 as well as several separate works: Alan MacEachern,Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable (Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island, Institute of Island Studies, 2003; MacEachern, Becoming Green Gables: The Diary of Myrtle Webb and Her Famous Farmhouse (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming); Edward MacDonald and BoydeBeck, “Lines in the Water: Time and a Place in a Fishery,” in Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island, ed. Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFadyen, and Irené Novaczek (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 218-45; and Edward MacDonald, “Shell Games: The Marine Commons, Economic Policy, and Oyster Culture in Prince Edward Island, 1865-1928,” in The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ed. Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Edward MacDonald, and Brian Payne (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 203-34.
[4] MacEachern and MacDonald, Summer Trade, 213-15.
[5] MacEachern and MacDonald, Summer Trade, 10.
[6] MacEachern and MacDonald, The Summer Trade, 11.
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