The modern era of travel began with the rise of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. Young British gentlemen set off across France and Italy, ostensibly to improve their educations by contemplating antiquities. Instead, they turned the tour into a perpetual bachelor party, guzzling wine, gambling in taverns and chasing the local filles de joie. The loutishness and philistinism of these young aristocrats led Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to call them “the greatest bunch of blockheads in nature.” The Scottish writer Tobias Smollett denounced them as “ignorant, petulant, rash and profligate.”

The French could be just as rude. The Marquis de Sade, who knew a thing or two about misbehavior, was appalled by the rudeness of his compatriots when he toured Italy in 1775. They were a national embarrassment, and the French government, he argued, should refuse them exit visas. (A measure, incidentally, that the Chinese Tourism Authority is reportedly considering.) In his novel “Aline et Valcour,” the marquis described Italian innkeepers as so wary that French visitors had to pretend to be English to get a bed for the night.

Beyond the carousing, the sheer wealth of this tourist class was provoking — and their souvenir-hunting amounted to looting. One of the more avid exemplars was Lord Elgin, the British diplomat who in 1803 removed the statues from the Parthenon to ship home from Athens to decorate his mansion (he nearly lost the lot in a shipwreck en route). By the late 19th century, America’s robber barons were soon living up to their name by stripping Europe of its treasures.

Gilded Age Americans did not even have to go to Europe to behave badly: They had the West for that. In the newly established Yellowstone National Park, the city slickers of the 1870s washed their socks in hot springs, carved their names on fragile volcanic rocks and chipped off fragments for their mantelpieces. And they gunned down any wildlife they could find.

“Andy’s rifle was always ready, and he blazed away at everything,” reported one satisfied visitor.

In today’s era of mass travel, the mantle of “worst tourist nation” has been passed around the globe with increasing speed. As the middle classes achieve the means to travel, they are denounced (by other countries) as disrespectful hicks, arriviste provincials unfit for polite society.

In the 1960s, the Ugly American became a mythic figure in Europe as loud Midwesterners who wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts disturbed the serenity of the Louvre and were thrown out of Parisian restaurants for asking for Coca-Cola instead of ordering wine. By the 1970s, Germans flush with marks became figures of fun, on British TV at least, for their humorless, entitled demeanor. A decade later, it was the Japanese who were mocked for photographing everything from stray cats to street signs.