In examining the importance of sport in relation to colonisation, the British Empire from the mid-nineteenth century until post-war decolonisation offers the foremost example for analysis. This period saw sports, exemplified by rugby and cricket, codified in Britain and subsequently circulated throughout the nation’s colonies. In 1897, legendary Indian cricketer Ranjitsinhji proclaimed, ‘cricket is certainly amongst the most powerful links which keep our Empire together.’ Indeed, the process of colonialism can be defined as the extent to which a nation upholds its political authority over a dependent territory. Was sport the principal means by which this was achieved? The extent to which sport contributed to the cultural indoctrination and Anglicisation of British subjects will be discussed before assessing the centrality of sport against other factors in contributing to the suppression of nationalism, which was pivotal in maintaining Britain’s imperial process. Finally, public school sport will be examined and the extent to which it influenced the future administrators of the colonies and permeated the running of the Empire.
Stemming from the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1970s, the importance of sport and wider culture has taken an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial historiography of the British Empire. With seminal works on cultural history, Brian Stoddart and J.A. Mangan lead the argument that sport and the public school ethos were central in the process of British imperialism. By contrast, traditional imperial historians such as Niall Ferguson and Piers Brendon neglect the role of culture as an influence on colonialism, arguing that economic and military factors enabled the Empire to explode in the 19th century. Paul Rich gives a Gramscianist view; arguing that the rituals of British sport transcended political rule, pushing informal cultural indoctrination to the heart of the imperial machine. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm offers a semi-structuralist approach, arguing that sport was a small part of a wider globalisation of capitalism. However, this essay will argue that sport was at the core of the colonial process. Sport normalised British values and culturally assimilated British subjects across the Empire, it was a more effective method of subduing colonial nationalism than military suppression prolonging the survival of Britain’s Empire, whilst sport equipped the men who ran the Empire, directly contributing to its economic and military successes. Sport was such a pivotal part of the imperial process that its legacy would outlast the Empire itself, remaining, along with the English language, ingrained in the societies of Britain’s former colonies in the twenty-first century.
Assessing the extent to which sport fundamentally Anglicised colonial society is crucial in addressing the centrality of sport to Britain’s imperial process as it provides insight into how institutionalised cultural indoctrination was within the colonial machine. Strong evidence in favour of sport at the heart of Britain’s process of colonialism lies in British sport transporting racial and class divisions of the mother country to the colonies. For example, racing and subsequently gambling. Gambling was effectively barred to those beyond the ruling elite, exemplified with off-course betting being barred in Western Australia by 1931, with only those socially suitable to attend racecourses given the right to gamble. Furthermore, membership of colonial Jockey Clubs was strictly controlled by imperial authorities; even in 1961 the South African Jockey Club had just 480 members, exemplifying the continued use of sport as a tool of imperial division throughout the colonial period. The cultural historian Marcus Clark argues that imperial sport could ‘transcend class distinctions’ and cites cricket as a force that demonstrated “the malleability of culture”. The examples of racing and gambling discredit this, whilst in cricket, impermeable class divisions were upheld. In Auckland in the mid-19th century, gentleman amateurs would face working-class professional cricketers, however away from the pitch, gentlemen would eat with spectators, whilst amateurs would be confined to the pavilion. In the dominions, where race was less easily divisive, sport was an instrumental tool in upholding the class divisions of the metropole and implementing British imperialism on the world. Racism also permeated British society; whether it was David Hume arguing that ‘negroes’ were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’ in 1777, Conrad referring to Africans as ‘savages’ in 1899 or Churchill asserting that whites were a ‘higher-grade race’ in 1937. It was entrenched in Britain, and this substantiates the argument that sport was subsequently a vehicle to impose this upon the British world. Race replaced professionalism as the division within cricket establishments of the non-white colonies. Cricket clubs in the West Indies, particularly in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad, were exclusively white, whilst rugby union was exclusively played by the white British and Boer communities in South Africa.