In the academic literature on sports, cricket holds the distinguished title of “Game of the Empire.” Renowned Trinidadian scholar C.L.R. James played an important role in establishing this connection in his celebrated book Beyond a Boundary. Footnote 1 The book opens by rephrasing a line from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “The English Flag”: instead of “What do they know of England who only England know?,” James asks, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” The modified verse situates cricket, not the English flag, as the true symbolic heart of the British Empire. James argues that cricket was a metaphor for the Empire’s economic, political, and racial constitution. The sport’s enduring presence across the former imperial territories—from South Africa and India to Australia and Jamaica—stands as a living testament to the role cricket played at the heart of this imperial project. Within this understanding, if empire means the British Empire, then cricket is, without question, its game. However, I want to propose a different reading of the term empire and its associated sport.
If we broaden our understanding and treat the concept of empire not only as a British historical project but also as a recurring modern formation that no single state monopolizes, defined by the combination of formal and informal political, military, and economic means to exercise power and control beyond national borders, then cricket’s claim to the title becomes far less firm. Within this expanded understanding of empire, a stronger candidate emerges in golf. Like cricket, golf expanded alongside the British Empire, but unlike cricket, it did not remain within the empire’s boundaries. By the early twentieth century, the sport had been adopted by the financial and industrial elites of the United States, as well as by the upper echelons of its military and government.Footnote 2 As U.S. power displaced British influence across the globe—from the Panama Canal Zone to strategically located Japan—U.S. versions of golf courses followed. By the mid-twentieth century, the United States, not Britain, was the world’s foremost promoter of this sport. Moreover, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, as transnational capital gained power relative to nation-states, global financial entities, Western and non-Western alike, displaced the U.S. as the sport’s main promoters in new regional frontiers. Hence, I contend that the title “Game of the Empire” still belongs to cricket, but the more expansive title “the Game of Empire” belongs to golf, which has accompanied each of these formations as the game of their ruling elites.
1. The British Empire and its games
Although Scotland is considered the cradle of golf, the sport took its distinctive form in nineteenth-century England.Footnote 3 As with cricket, the early global diffusion of golf paralleled the expansion of the British Empire. The first golf clubs founded outside England or Scotland were established in India, where the Royal Calcutta Golf Club and the Royal Bombay Golf Club were founded in 1829 and 1842, respectively. Throughout the nineteenth century, more clubs were founded in key colonial locations, including the Royal Curragh Golf Club in Ireland (1856), the Adelaide Golf Club in Australia (1870), the Taiping Golf Club in Malaysia (1888), and the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club (1889). The royal titles of these clubs were not mere marketing strategies but rather a true reflection of the types of members these associations welcomed. Golf also became a fashionable activity among local elites in areas where the British Empire did not directly rule but maintained a strong presence. This was the case with the Buenos Aires Golf Club in Argentina (1878), the Bangkok Golf Club in Thailand (1890), and the Pachuca Golf Club in Mexico (1895).Footnote 4
Cricket spread well within the borders of the Empire, where elites and, later, local popular groups rapidly adopted the sport. The popularization of cricket turned the game into a symbolic microcosm of the Empire. Cricket became not only an athletic contest but also a way to engage in a metaphorical battle to reshape ideas about race, inferiority, and subordination between those in power and those marginalized.Footnote 5 Despite the key symbolic struggles that occurred within the world of cricket, or possibly because these struggles made sense mainly within the British Empire, the sport never became popular beyond the formal limits of the British regime.Footnote 6 The main difference between cricket and golf at this early stage of global development was that golf did not attract a popular audience (a situation that was different in England and Scotland, where members of the working class played the sport). Instead, in its early stages of globalization, golf was associated with elites, groups less inclined to challenge the British and more interested in cooperating with both the formal and informal structures of the Empire. Other sports that traveled with empire, such as baseball, basketball, and (association) football, were, like cricket, embraced by popular classes and turned into vehicles of national identity and contestation.Footnote 7
2. The U.S. informal Empire and its game
Golf, however, did not remain bound within the British Empire’s orbit. The United States expressed its imperial ambitions by proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. The doctrine regarded Latin America and the Caribbean as the “natural” sphere of U.S. influence, and, hence, off-limits to further European interference. By the turn of the twentieth century, the rapid growth of the U.S. economy enabled the Monroe Doctrine to find a vehicle in golf to expand its cultural influence among regional economic and political elites. The connection between golf and U.S. imperial perceptions took shape as businessmen associated golf with the spirit of capitalism. For instance, on July 2, 1910, the magazine United States Investor reported on the speech delivered by David R. Forgan at the “New York Bankers Meeting.” The banker used golf to educate people about capitalism. He noted, “Besides having bunkers, bankers, like golfers, are in danger of water hazards and bad lies,” stating later that “just as in golf, the chief trouble is with the man. We are inclined to blame our golf sticks and blame the bunkers, but, after all, it is usually our own fault if we make a mess of it” (p. 46). The alleged connection between golf and capitalism became pervasive in the business world, both inside and outside the U.S.Footnote 8
Building on this connection, businessmen actively spread the game by founding Anglo-American golf clubs in the “natural” sphere of U.S. influence, such as Mexico.Footnote 9 In this case, the British-founded golf clubs were replaced or taken over by U.S. businessmen.Footnote 10 Despite the transition, these golf clubs continued the old tradition of restricting membership to prominent Anglo-American immigrants and the most select members of the local elite. The business world was not the only vehicle of golf’s expansion under U.S. influence; a second was the U.S. Army.Footnote 11 The army built the first golf course in Panama.Footnote 12 Later, after the fall of the British Empire, the U.S. Army played a far-reaching role, such as in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq.Footnote 13 Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon “operates more than 170 golf courses worldwide.”Footnote 14
During the twentieth century, and despite its British origins, golf developed a strong association with the United States globally; this connection was closely linked to capitalism. As the economist Armen Alchian wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (July 13, 1977), “Why is golf solely in capitalist societies? Because it is not merely a sport. It is an activity, a lifestyle, a behavior, a manifestation of the essential human spirit. Golf’s ethic, principles, rules, and procedures of play are totally capitalistic.” The strength of this connection is best illustrated by the fact that, in the late twentieth century, several courses in Scotland, the sport’s birthplace, were modernized to imitate features of the game as played in the United States, such as longer courses.Footnote 15
3. The game of Empire
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, two trends emerged in the renewed global expansion of golf. First, global financial corporations supported the creation of international golf tournament circuits.Footnote 16 These contests are usually played in clubs certified by the U.S. Professional Golf Association Tour. To be certified and host these lucrative tournaments, clubs must comply with the association’s specifications, including the type of grass grown on the course. The replacement of local grasses with Western-style turf grasses requires imported seeds, chemical maintenance programs, technicians, and the knowledge needed to keep the grass in pristine condition. As Bradley Klein suggested, these requirements generate a “kind of agronomic dependence on a global scale.”Footnote 17 The second trend was international real estate companies promoting the development of new high-end residential areas around exclusive courses.Footnote 18 Local communities have sometimes resisted these developments. In countries as diverse as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Mexico locals have used almost identical arguments to oppose these courses (e.g., ecological contamination, land dispossession, water scarcity, and labor exploitation), while developers have used almost identical arguments to convince locals of their benefits (e.g., ecological preservation, modernity, jobs, and economic growth).Footnote 19 Golf, then, is contested mostly beyond the fairway—over land, water, and labor—rather than, as in James’s cricket, through play itself.Footnote 20 Dubai embodies both trends: before 1980, the city had no grass golf courses and occupied no special place in the global economic order. In the following three decades, however, Dubai constructed some of the most hyper-modern and exclusive golf courses globally, hosted major tournaments sponsored by global financial corporations, became a symbol of a city successfully driven by real estate developers, and evolved into an international financial center.Footnote 21 The pattern extends beyond Western capital: Chinese developers multiplied courses despite a 2004 national moratorium on new construction, and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolled the LIV Golf circuit, which sought not to change the game but to buy into it.Footnote 22
Klein argued that no other sport so archetypically represents the West in its outlook, so strongly promotes upper-middle and upper-class interests, and at the same time takes up so much space.Footnote 23 I agree with Klein’s characterization and would add that golf has also universalized, far beyond the West, a particular Anglo-American aesthetic associated with U.S.-formed class and racial ideas. Unsurprisingly, in a 2015 interview, then-candidate Donald Trump celebrated golf’s elitist connotation, saying, “It may be elitist, and perhaps that’s what golf needs. Let golf be elitist,” urging people to “work hard and aspire” to afford it, while doubting efforts to make the game more popular, since “golf is never going to be basketball.”Footnote 24 Implicitly, the comment appears to play on the association between Black athletes and basketball, while suggesting the opposite for golf. Beyond the intent of the comment, the global link between whiteness and golf remains one of the least-explored aspects in the specialized literature on this game.
4. Iterations of Empire
Cricket is the Game of the Empire, inherently linked to the historical imperial project that made it meaningful. In contrast, golf has evolved from Britain to the United States and into global financial institutions, becoming the Game of Empire by aligning with successive imperial formations and outlasting each. Along with it, from early twentieth-century clubhouses in Hong Kong to Dubai’s new hyper-modern courses, comes a sport intertwined with the very grammar of empire—marked, as studies from South Africa to Mexico show, by class echelons, a supposedly biological gender order, and natural racial principles that underpin global hierarchies.Footnote 25 Yet in nineteenth-century Scotland, golf was still a popular athletic game played by all social classes, and the course was often marked by carnivalesque interactions between women and men.Footnote 26 Institutions are hard to change, but they are made by humans. Therefore, it is up to golfers to decide whether the game continues to embrace imperial iterations or returns to its more democratic roots.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: H.C.; Data curation: H.C.; Formal analysis: H.C.; Investigation: H.C.; Methodology: H.C.; Project administration: H.C.; Resources: H.C.; Supervision: H.C.; Writing - original draft: H.C.; Writing - review & editing: H.C.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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