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Thomas Cook began leading tour groups to Egypt and the Holy Land 150 years ago in 1869. He was even present at the opening ceremoy of the Suez Canal in November that year. So began the history of modern Western organized tourism in the Middle East. 
Cook's company would soon establish "tourist offices in Cairo (1872), Jaffa (1874) and Jerusalem (1881)...followed by the opening of Cook agencies in Constantinople (1883), Algiers (1887), Tunis (1901), and Khartum (1901)." Ref. Hunter 2003
The history of Thomas Cook's travel empire may be regarded as synonymous with that of imperial Britain. As of this morning, the company he founded has now collapsed—and the timing could not be more symbolic!
"When British power weakened, so did Cook's." This was the inadvertently foreboding conclusion of F. Robert Hunter's 2004 paper, "Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868-1914" (Middle Eastern Studies, 40:5). Image: Poster for 1904–05 travel season.
F. Robert and Joan M. Hunter drew attention to the significance for Middle Eastern Studies of the Thomas Cook archive, in a 2003 notice in MESA Bulletin. They specifically acknowledge the company archivist Paul Smith, who was laid off earlier this summer. jstor.org/stable/23062746
In the 2004 paper, Hunter focuses on the Cook & Son company as an attempt to understand modern tourism in the Middle East in light of its broader political and economic context in the late-nineteenth century.
Hunter argues that the company owed its success not only to the entrepreneurial skills of Cook and his son (John Mason), but also to the fortunes of the British Empire. In turn, the company itself became instrumental to imperial ambitions.
According to Hunter, Cook & Son benefited from projecting its public image as "a semi-official agency" of the British.
Note that Thomas Cook also served as the official travel agent for Hajj services to pilgrims from British India. cam.ac.uk/research/news/…
Thomas Cook & Son was also recruited by the Ottoman government for Kaiser Wilhelm II's trip to Palestine in 1898. Here is a demand notice by the company's Istanbul agent for payment of additional expenses—from the Ottoman archives, published by Hasan Polat & Aytuğ Arslan (2019)
On the first Thomas Cook excursion in the Middle East, a key archival source is the diary of one Miss Riggs, which details the tour group's two-month journey from January 25 to March 25, 1869. The diary has been studied by Andrew Humphreys: grandhotelsegypt.com/?p=2829
Given the unexpected popularity of this impromptu thread, some additional comment are in order. Partly, it's to note that the words "Tourism & Empire" alone (as in Hunter's title above, and as many have retweeted), don't capture the full complexities of this story.
It's one thing to say (as I did, perhaps misleadingly) that Cook & Son was the official travel agent for the Hajj, but another thing entirely to recognize that this was a rather brief enterprise (1886–93) that ended in failure. It's quite telling why.
In this insightful (and Open-Access!) paper with a delightfully catchy title, @MCLowISU looks into the history of Hajj travel during that period and "the failure of the Thomas Cook experiment."
It's a complicated but fascinating story that reveals the power and resilience of an existing cartel—involving the Sharif of Mecca's monopoly on all Hajj services in the Hijaz, local brokerage businesses in Bombay, and the Malay/Javanese shipping networks in the Indian Ocean.
This may be one of the most interesting papers in global history I've read recently. It also relates in some ways to my own critiques (esp. as a medievalist) of Hunter's perspective on tourism in the paper cited above, on which I'll try to share more later.
But of course, as I hope should be clear, I'm not a specialist in any of the history outlined here, but merely a curious reader and a peddler of fine work by other scholars. So please do follow and read their work!
Note, for instance, the intriguing case of the hospital run by Thomas Cook in Luxor that served the medical needs of many Egyptians, as I learned from this set of tweets by @khowaga:
