A growing movement that questions the increasing deepening of economic, social, political and cultural relations among more and less developed countries -- the so called globalization process — is giving a new lease of life to some theoretical currents that seemed to be on the verge of extinction, such as the theory of imperialism in its Leninist and cultural criticism versions. The goal of this article is to probe the continuities and divergences between those two lineages that have made their influence felt in some theoretical approaches to tourism. The author attempts to show how some of the main tenets of these two theories can be traced to recent criticism of globalization and to caution against an eventual tumbling into some of the pitfalls these two traditions were unable to avoid.