This book provides a fresh reinterpretation of the global spread of modern leisure travel in the middle of the nineteenth century through a critical comparative reading of twenty-two works of popular travel writing from maritime Southeast Asia and Ceylon. The examination of these books reveals a coherent genre that was seemingly frivolous yet in fact intensely political, with shared rules and tropes that served to legitimise colonial rule and codify aspects of colonial culture in the popular metropolitan imagination. On the ground in Asia, the emergent practices and preferences of this new proto-tourism reinforced and played off contemporary processes of colonisation. The analysis employs a novel transimperial framework, analysing Dutch and British travellers and their journeys in the Dutch and British colonies of the region, revealing the importance of colonial proto-tourism in creating an encompassing culture of empire that traversed national and colonial boundaries.