Sport is a crucial component of national identity, with national sides vying with one another for dominance on a regular basis. This is, of course, no new tradition, but one which has emerged and strengthened in the last couple of centuries to dominate news bulletins and parliamentary debates. Recently in Britain a question loomed over the takeover of one of its dominant football clubs by an American with no understanding of the game, while we were inundated with news of London's eventually successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic games. British boxers who fight in the world arena regularly receive wide coverage, while Wimbledon broadcasts are filled with speculation over whether Britain will ever field another champion. It was not, of course, ever thus. At the height of empire, Britain could be proud that her sporting traditions were being adopted by the subjects of her colonies and could take pride as skills and team spirit developed. The country could send cricket sides to demonstrate the finer points of the game to the antipodes, India, and the West Indies with little fear that her opponents would win more than the occasional match. But in this book, Patrick McDevitt demonstrates how the struggle for a national identity separate from the mother country saw the creation of alternative games and the ability to out-bat the mother country in the twentieth century. Although some of the points he makes here about nation building have been suggested before, McDevitt wants to explore how sport contributed to the masculine identity of these fledgling nations. He argues that this focus on sport as a means to nation building marginalized women as exemplars of the new nations he examines and also worked to exclude men who did not fit the paradigm of the sportsman. Although it is an interesting thesis, the book is weaker on this assessment of masculinity than it is on imperial, racial, and class stresses that emerged in the games he discusses.

The book is divided into five case studies, but they are not, unfortunately, quite parallel, which undercuts some of the arguments McDevitt is making. For someone who wishes to consider the question of sport in the empire and the uses to which it is put, this is very helpful, but the inclusion of the development of specifically Irish games like hurling, which avoided national sides and specifically excluded certain types of Irish residents from playing, is more indicative of how the creation of a new game can be used to retreat from imperial competition than about how masculinity is inflected in more than a rather obvious way. Polo's role in India is also explored to reveal the way that elites across a racial divide employed sport to reinforce class power. Similarly, the chapter on boxing revisits the challenges to white masculinity in the early twentieth century with the emergence of several African American champions who traveled the world looking for worthy opponents. Although McDevitt's analysis of Jack Johnson's visit to Australia and the way that race was increasingly putting pressure on white definitions of masculinity is very illuminating, it essentially deepens the work done by Gail Bederman and reveals how the strains she noted in white masculinity were not limited to an American context but were alive and well in the British Empire. He is very persuasive about the way that Australian commentators tried to parse their racism by using the example of black Australian boxer Peter Jackson to embody how a black boxer should behave modestly. The confusion felt by the sporting press and the public in general is clear in the pressure on promoters not to arrange bouts between blacks and whites and the contemporary discussion's refuge in murky formulations about the animalism of the darker races. Although this may tell us something about masculinity, it is unclear what it tells us as this was a general white response to any challenge from nonwhite (and that was a large category) sportsmen.

In fact, as McDevitt turns to a consideration of the 1932–33 Bodyline cricket tour of Australia, it becomes clear how the reactions against black opponents were not that different from those occasioned by challenges from colonial and lower-class demonstrations of ability. McDevitt shows how British teams finessed the class question in cricket by the division between gentlemen and players, with a gentleman whose social standing was impeccable but whose batting might be less than perfect always being chosen to captain a side. McDevitt's purpose, however, is not to revise this much-examined facet of English sport. Instead, he assesses how the emergence of a strong Australian side in the early 1930s (featuring the impeccable batting of the young Donald Bradman) made the British team abandon all pretensions of the gentlemanly aspects of the game in order to assure that they could win. After losing a Test series to Australia in 1930, they chose a new captain whose social skills were less focused than his desire to captain a winning side. The Scotsman Douglas Jardine's strategy depended on fast bowling almost calculated to hit the batsman who was also being crowded by fielders. Without going into the details of this form of play, dubbed “Bodyline,” it was clearly seen by the Australians as unsporting. The English response was for officials at the home of cricket, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), to back the home team and cast aspersions on the masculinity of their opponents although they themselves had never seen this type of strategy played. Although the British won that series of Test matches, when the same strategy was practiced on them the next year by the West Indies in a Test series, they began to appreciate the Australian point of view. As McDevitt makes clear, West Indies cricket had traditionally used fast bowling of the type adopted in Bodyline but had not used it in Test matches as they recognized that the British did not play that way and, as international arbiters of the game, would probably rule it illegal. They certainly did so after being trounced by the West Indies. But by that time they had also sacrificed their former position as being above the game in the way they adjudicated how the game would be played. The Australians developed their own central governing body for cricket, and the MCC no longer were the undoubted rule makers of the game.

McDevitt tells these different stories well and unpicks the ways that class, imperial, and racial tensions are all revealed by these different examples. However, his analysis of how ideas about masculinity were inflected in these controversies is less satisfying. Sport at this level is played by certain types of men who generally see physical strength and sporting ability as definitive of masculinity. Anyone who does not exhibit these features may be characterized as less masculine on some sort of scale. McDevitt occasionally discusses how other teams are considered effeminate or womanish if they complain or affect some new type of stratagem, but this discussion is not as illuminating as it might be. Effeminacy is not the same thing as being characterized as, say, an old woman, and it would have been helpful if he acknowledged that effeminacy is a category that is less about how some men emulate women than about the difficulty that other men have in coming to terms with a range of male behaviors. This lack of nuance in his discussion mars what is otherwise a well-researched and thought-provoking book on sport in the empire. McDevitt's willingness to give a view of sport from the perspective of those outside the metropole is refreshing and a necessary counterpoint to the many explorations of cricket's role as an imperial glue holding the empire together. For this reason, it is a valuable contribution to explorations of the way that sport both strengthened and weakened the empire.