This book surveys current writing on the history of the modern hotel, focusing on three areas of vibrant and timely scholarly enquiry: the uniqueness of the American hotel, the contested status of the colonial and postcolonial hotel, and the hotel's embroilment in violent conflict. It explores the hotel as an institution that incubates innovation, enables commercial relations on a variety of scales, and supplies an arena for negotiating relations of political, cultural, and economic power. The volume presents a number of case studies, including the hotel in wartime and as a terrorist target, and critically engages with innovative scholarship that links the relationship of the hotel to wider narratives of Western modernity. It is aimed at tourism studies scholars, as well as history and critical and applied tourism studies students, at undergraduate and graduate levels.