Cricket, Football and Identity After Empire

Many of the world's favourite sports spread through the British Empire and British trade networks. Cricket travelled with soldiers, officials and schools to India, the Caribbean, Australia and southern Africa; the first Test match was played in Melbourne in 1877, and India played its first Test in 1932. Colonized peoples did not simply copy these games but made them their own: the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James argued in Beyond a Boundary (1963) that West Indian cricket became a stage for anti-colonial pride and self-respect.

Indian scholar Ashis Nandy joked that cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English. Football spread through British sailors, engineers and merchants to South America and Europe, where local clubs quickly overtook British teams. Beating the former colonial power on the field became deeply symbolic. Sport shows how cultural forms imposed or introduced by empire could be reclaimed as national identity.