Travel and Colonialism: Flight Routes
Don’t worry, this is not going to be a long piece on how the history of colonialism impacts travel and tourism and how we think about different parts of the world. It’s going to be a nice, short piece on one very specific piece of that larger whole, namely, how it affects where commercial planes fly to.
Over the past several months I’ve been doing a ton of travel research, and I do mean a ton to plan around-the-world trips. I find it soothing. And when I do my travel planning I look at everything – not just what to see, but how to get there, where to stay, everything. Which means I spend a ton of time looking up flights between all sorts of random places. And funnily enough, a lot of airlines connect countries to their former colonizers, but not to other places.
I first noticed it when I was looking into flights from Lisbon, Portugal, to Botswana in southern Africa. I couldn’t find a direct flight, but I did notice that there were direct flights to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and Luanda, the capital of Angola. Both of which were Portuguese colonies until the 1970s.
It doesn’t need to even be that recent of a colony. Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Colombia all have non-stop flights to Madrid (and often Barcelona) and they gained independence from Spain in the 19th century. And many, if not most, flights to South Africa I’ve seen route through the Netherlands.
Of course, this isn’t always the case, as there are plenty of airport hubs. You can get nearly anywhere from London, for example, whether that country was part of the British Empire or not. Dubai’s, Doha’s, and Abu Dhabi’s airports get traffic from everywhere, as those cities are at the geographic cross-roads between Europe, Asia, and Africa. But it’s still striking to me how many flights I’ve seen follow old colonial ties.
And when I thought about this, it made total sense. Relationships between former colonies and colonizers live on in shared language, and economic and social ties. It’s not like a country becomes a blank slate when it gains independence. And those ongoing ties would be made concrete by flight patterns. Airlines are only going to fly routes that get enough traffic/are profitable enough to make it worth their while. With the ongoing ties they are more likely to get the volume of people travelling between the two locations to make it worth maintaining.
Still, it’s always worth noting that even though the world is no longer dominated by European empires, that legacy still actively impacts the world we live in today. Even in something as innocuous as what non-stop flights people can take.
