Cricket and Englishness are so intertwined, Dominic Malcolm tells us in his new book, that coupling the two terms often amounts to a pleonasm. But, Malcolm warns, assumptions that cricket is quintessentially English or that Englishness is necessarily sporting and fair can be dangerous and unexamined premises. Thus, he embarks on an exploration of the origins, dissemination, and alterations of the sport and its connections to English identities, seeking to provide a theoretical cohesiveness to his project via Norbert Elias's figurational sociology.
The introduction briefly summarizes the history of cricket by analyzing the patterns of its evolution according to Allen Guttmann's classic sports modernization thesis. Cricket is modern in many ways, of course, but its multiple and coexisting game forms, its associations with rural life and county representation in England, and its relative lack of specialization betray its unmodern characteristics. Malcolm also forthrightly claims the book as an exercise in historical sociology, and he briefly introduces the reader to the social and figurational theory of Elias (and later Eric Dunning), on which the book's analytical interpretations heavily rely. For Malcolm and other sports sociologists trained at the University of Leicester, Elias's “civilizing process,” which assesses the way social groups achieve consensus—in this case about a reduction in violence and social conflict—provides the key to understanding the evolution of sports from their barbaric to controlled forms. Somewhat disappointingly, Malcolm also frequently discusses what the book will not do, including examine race, imperialism, or English national identity per se. Instead, he limits his scope to a discussion of cricket's diffusion and receptions across the globe and to an elucidation of the relationship between Englishness and cricket as it spread.
The first chapter utilizes Elias's concepts of “sportization” and “parliamentarization” to rationalize the application of standards and rules to the folk game in the seventeenth century. The aristocrats who gave the sport its first modern forms stressed self-restraint and reduced violence, characteristics that Malcolm links to social trends in English society after the Civil War. Chapter 2 uses some relatively well-known cricket literature of the nineteenth century to show how the elite reimaged cricket as English in origins and behavioral norms. The author describes the development of cricket and the recasting of Victorian Englishness as concomitant processes that often intersected and reflected one another, though an analysis of the role of masculinities in either or both would have been welcome. The use of cricket to spread Englishness to domestic and imperial subjects retreads ground covered first by J. A. Mangan and Jack Williams, but Malcolm's third chapter summarizes many of the ideological assumptions of nineteenth-century cultural imperialism.
The following three chapters reappropriate the work of other cricket historians to create a master explanation of the varied diffusion of cricket in America, the Caribbean, and the Celtic nations. Countering other commentators who have emphasized that the rise of baseball and the emergence of postbellum American national identity explain an intolerance to cricket, Malcolm convincingly argues that differences between Anglo-American and American patterns of adoption explain its decline. More receptive working-class Northerners could not afford to field professionals or purchase club memberships like their elite Anglo-American counterparts, and they were often told of their own cultural inferiority in classed and ethnic terms when engaging with the sport. Furthermore, diverse migrant groups new to America often showed little interest in a sport described as quintessentially English. The Caribbean was more receptive, and Malcolm outlines how cricket's adoption was negotiated there, resulting in a complex amalgam of accommodation and resistance. His discussion of the introduction of dangerous fast bowling by West Indian cricketers and the racialized rejection of it among English players and commentators introduces an opportunity for valuable critical analysis that is only partially seized. A final chapter in this section on cricket in the Celtic nations challenges the elision between Englishness and Britishness as an oft-repeated mistake in studies of sport.
Malcolm grapples with cricket's role in building national and diasporic identities in the final three chapters. Though racism and cultural stereotypes were common among English cricket supporters and on the grounds, diasporic communities found solace and solidarity in grassroots cricket clubs. In chapter 7, the extent to which these shared experiences fostered ethnic or diasporic—perhaps even national or postimperial—identities is asserted but not always fully exhibited. More successful is the exploration of shifting national identities constituted by the Barmy Army in the 1990s, a supporters' group that promoted openness, cultural exploration, and antiracism in the sport. Alongside an analysis of the very diverse 2005 Ashes team and the celebrity cult of Andrew Flintoff, Malcolm positions the army as reflective of articulations of Englishness as creative and pluralistic, pacifist and tolerant. A final substantive chapter evaluates the journalistic tropes that emerged to cast Jamaica as deviant and violent in the wake of former England cricketer and Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer's mysterious death in a Kingston hotel room in 2007. The episode is itself puzzling—at least six different theories of how he died emerged—but Malcolm uses it to elucidate the English “othering” of postcolonial peoples.
The book will be most lauded by sports sociologists for its ability to recapture the important contributions of other writers into a single framework of cricket's diffusion, highlighted by its sensitivity to the relational construction of identity forwarded by Elias. Malcolm is at his best when analyzing the popular discourses of particular figures and events in the last twenty years, and he should be praised for his ability to string together the existing literature on cricket. But empirical historians might find it rather less convincing. About half of the chapters use few to no primary sources, making some of the conclusions seem secondhand and derivative. More important, Elias's theory neatly explains social interaction and long-term social evolution, but it neglects the fruitful messiness of contemporary analyses of British national, imperial, and postcolonial identities that privilege the dynamics of empire, race, class, gender, and generation. The use of Elias is not misplaced, but any such use needs to be accompanied by the historiographical interventions of critical theorists and new imperial historians to be fully appreciated by historians, not just sociologists. Nonetheless, Malcolm has laid the groundwork for future scholars of sport to integrate these multivarious approaches in the future.
