Tourism does not exist in isolation as an economic activity and is embedded in numerous highly complex internal and external networks. As such, understanding tourism's relations to places and regions is a challenging task. The introduction to this special issue defines the editors’ goals of proposing that an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach can provide an insightful conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between tourism development and local and global economies. The first set of papers clearly outline and demonstrate the EEG perspective. The latter set of papers are not explicitly EEG oriented; however, the arguments and findings that the authors make have clear evolutionary theory implications. The special issue is intended to generate further research and dialog on the relations among tourism, development and place.