Introduction: Sport and Politics

Author(s): Jeffrey Hill

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 38, No. 3, Sport and Politics (Jul., 2003),
pp. 355-361
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180641
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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ( 2003 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 38(3), 355-361,
[0022-0094(200307)38:3;355-361 ;034322]

Jeffrey Hill

Introduction: Sport and Politics

In his contribution to this collection of articles Guttmann remarks: 'The inter-

section of sports and politics has been a major focus of contemporary sports
history.' He goes on to provide a perceptive overview of some of the 'broad
areas' in which engaged historians (as he describes them) have worked. It is
important to be reminded of this activity, and of its extent, which is consider-
able. However, what Guttmann's discussion also reveals is an unevenness in
the coverage. Three characteristics in particular stand out from the field he
surveys. First, a great deal of the activity he comments on has been
non-British; second, much of its emphasis has been on the politics of sport
rather than the contribution of sport to wider political processes; and third,
the intersection has mostly been approached from the direction of sports
history, rather than from that of 'mainstream' political history. In Britain,
where academic sports history has a rather shorter lineage than that of North
America, whence many of Guttmann's examples are drawn, the focus on poli-
tics is less marked. Whilst it would be unfair to say that sports historians have
followed the convention of the sports journalists whose copy has so often pro-
vided their sources, and kept sport apart from normal life, there is nonetheless
a case for saying that much of what has been written in Britain is 'history with
the politics left out'. There are, to be sure, some notable exceptions to this ten-
dency. The names of Grant Jarvie, Lincoln Allison, Barrie Houlihan and James
Riordan immediately stand out as pioneers of a politically-attuned study of
sport (though, arguably, only one of them might claim to be a historian).'
Moreover, many theoretical approaches to sport and leisure, whether Marxist
or Weberian, have been avowedly political. John Hargreaves's Sport, Power
and Culture is a fine example, informed by a reading of Gramsci.2 Equally,
though, there is an inclination in some of the newer forms of social and cul-
tural history to eschew the political, at least in the sense of politics with a
capital 'P'. The flight into the cultural, which is warmly to be encouraged for
many reasons, has nonetheless often transformed 'politics' into something
more broadly to do with 'power relations', with the result that the political
process in its institutional governmental and party guises, and at its various

1 G. Jarvie, Sport, Racism and Ethnicity (London 1991); L. Allison, The Changing Politics of
Sport (Manchester 1993); B. Houlihan, The Government and Politics of Sport (London 1991); J.
Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society: The Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and
the USSR (Cambridge 1977).
2 J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports
in Britain (Cambridge 1987).

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356 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 3

levels - municipal, national and international - has received muted empha-

sis. If, however, we want to restore the emphasis on an older tradition of writ-
ing about political institutions, and bring sport into political history, then
Peter J. Beck's copiously documented study of the involvement in sport - in
this case football - by the British government is the outstanding example of
how the subject should be approached; it brings the perspective of the diplo-
matic historian to bear on sport and forcefully reminds us that there is a range
of archival sources relating to governmental institutions and those who serve
in them that will yield much about the place of sport in politics.3
However, the academic path taken by sports history over recent years has
veered away from the direction indicated in Beck's study. Sports history is now
a well-developed branch of the discipline of history, having grown especially
big since the early 1980s.4 Its promotion has happened to some extent in
conventional history departments, but usually as a result of lone historians
nurturing their individual interest, working their passage as historians of sport
by fulfilling other teaching roles in the mainstream syllabus. There have been
few, if any, 'schools' of sports history in this institutional context. More
usually, the historical study of sport is to be found as part of the expanding
multi-disciplinary focus of 'sports studies', where historians combine with
academics from disciplines such as sociology, law, business studies, psycholo-
gy and human movement studies, not always in a relationship of equality, nor
always with a consensual view of what 'sport' is or where its importance
lies. As a result of such conditions of existence, sports history now stands in a
similar position to that which Eric Hobsbawm observed in relation to the then
'new' social history over 30 years ago.5 It is, to some extent, 'fashionable', its
development has been 'copious', but it has proceeded in an 'unsystematic'
form. What Hobsbawm called for in social history at the beginning of the
1970s might equally well apply today to the burgeoning area of sports history
- namely, a recognition of the totality of society, and an ability to explain (as
Hobsbawm claimed that the companion disciplines of economics and socio-
logy had not satisfactorily explained) the processes of social change. The com-
parison is, I think, an apt one, for if sports history sits anywhere in the body of
the discipline it is probably most comfortably placed in social history (which
now, if the new journal to be launched under the auspices of the Social History
Society is a guide to general practice, also embraces 'the cultural'). Whether
this is its natural location, however, is a question that the practitioners of
sports history must debate, for their work has been panoramic, and has
developed associations with economics, anthropology, demography, social

3 Peter J. Beck, Scoring for Britain: International Football and International Politics, 1900-
1939 (London 1999).
4 Richard Cox's bibliographical work has faithfully and methodically recorded this growth; see
his recent British Sport: A Bibliography to 2000, 3 vols (London 2003).
5 E.J. Hobsbawm, 'From Social History to the History of Society', Daedalus, 100 (Winter
1971), 20-45; see also idem, 'Labour History and Ideology', Journal of Social History (Summer
1974).

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Hill: Sport and Politics 357

and cultural issues and politics. There have, to be sure, been attempts to
stimulate discussion; 'where now?' has been the subject of a number of inter-
ventions, in both Britain and elsewhere.6 These discussions need to continue,
and sports historians might with profit return to some of Eric Hobsbawm's
observations to guide them on their way.
One example might serve to illustrate the kind of liaisons which could repay
close attention by introducing a concern with sport and politics at a level both
within and below that of formal institutions. It concerns one of Hobsbawm's
own specialisms, labour history. In a number of ways its academic develop-
ment has paralleled that of sports history. It originated outside the academy,
for example, in the minds of enthusiasts who wanted to set the history of
'ordinary' people alongside the conventional history of elites. Many sports
historians were likewise motivated to study the history of something demotic,
that captivated the minds of the many (or at least of the many who were male).
There are several sports historians (now of the 'older generation') who have
moved into the genre having previously worked in labour history. There is an
understandable common appeal in matters of 'the popular'. In sports history,
as in the history of the labour movement, they have had to grapple with the
bias wrought by gender and institutionalism, the two most powerful implicit
assumptions that colour the historiography of these subjects. Are we simply
perpetuating the power of male-dominated institutions through the versions of
the history of sport that we produce, as we have often done in labour history?
In spite of these common concerns, resulting from connections in provenance
and methodology, there has been little attempt from either side to make links.
The extensive work of Stephen G. Jones, up to his tragic early death in 1988,
remains an exception for its fusing of the themes of sport and labour.7 It
desperately deserves updating and revision. Jones's research suggests a rich
culture of politically-charged recreation, though his national perspectives
provide a top-down view which has little room for detailed case studies of
particular districts. How, and whether, the constellation of co-ops, socialist
societies, trade unions, Labour parties, and other 'labour' organizations
moulded themselves into a coherent provider of 'alternative' recreation at the
local level remains an unanswered question. The conventional wisdom among
labour historians, moreover, appears to be that there is little likely to be gained
from exploration of this field. Ross McKibbin's view - that the Labour
Party's vision was electoral rather than cultural, and that Britain had no need

6 See, for example, Richard Holt, 'Sport and History: The State of the Subject in Britain',
Twentieth Century British History, vol. 7, no. 2 (1996), 231-52; Jeffrey Hill, 'British Sports
History: A Post-Modern Future?', Journal of Sport History, 23 (1996), 1-19; C.M. Parratt,
'About Turns: Reflecting on Sport History in the 1990s', Sport History Review, 29, 1 (1998),
4-17.

7 See Stephen G. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class: Organised Labour and Sport in
Interwar Britain (Manchester 1988) and Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of
Leisure 1918-1939 (London 1986).

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358 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 3

of a German-style socialist sub-culture - continues to exercise a strong influ-

ence.8 Thus, as History Workshop Journal noted despairingly some 20 years
ago, '[G]iven the paucity of primary research upon the local culture of Labour
between the wars (we know more about the culture of Chartism) it is impossi-
ble to say how extensive [the] Labour culture was, or in what way it inflected
political behaviour and political expectations.'9
Politics, to take this one example, has been seen as having little to do with
sport and recreation. One wonders how far the ideological force of the
oft-repeated mantra of the sports man and woman, that sport and politics do
not mix, has shaped historians' perceptions of the relationship between the
two entities. The articles in this issue of the Journal of Contemporary History
are therefore to be welcomed for bringing sport and politics firmly together.
All have originated in the genre of sports history, and are the work of younger
scholars whose academic careers have been largely in the sports history/sports
studies developments of the past few years. If I might be permitted a sporting
metaphor, they are all products of the youth policy rather than the transfer
system. Their emphasis falls chiefly on questions of how sports and their
development might contribute to our understanding of fundamental political
issues, rather than on the processes through which sport itself has been politi-
cized. They display, therefore, something of that Hobsbawmian concern with
social totalities, but perhaps a more immediate source of inspiration is Hilary
McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart, whose edited collection of essays on West
Indies cricket culture raises so many fascinating questions about the relation-
ships between sport and 'development'.10 This is exemplified by four articles
that, in different ways and by reference to different case studies, deal with the
interlinked problems of liberation, nation and state-building, post-colonialism
and modernization. In examining the emergence of the idea and politics of
'Pakistan' in the years immediately preceding Independence, Paul Dimeo
shows the importance to a specific political cause of sport, its clubs and the
loyalties they generate. M.A. Jinnah, whose knowledge of football was slight,
was nevertheless an astute enough politician to be sharply aware of the role to
be played in Muslim politics by Mohammedan Sporting, a leading football
club in Calcutta. Jinnah embraced the club accordingly as a conduit of support
for the Muslim League, and thus sport assisted that organization's late
emergence as an inheritor of British power in the sub-continent. In Ireland, by
contrast, the problems of the successor state in the 1920s are seen by Mike
Cronin as turning, in cultural terms, on the need to represent the new nation to
itself in a meaningful way. Interestingly, when 'modernity' was in vogue in so
many other putative post-colonial situations, where national leaderships had
sprung from a western-educated elite, the project in Ireland sought inspiration

8 Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910-1924 (Oxford 1974).
9 History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians, 12 (Autumn 1981), 7.
10 Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart (eds), Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket
Culture (Manchester 1995).

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Hill: Sport and Politics 359

and influence much more in notions of 'tradition'. Cronin plots the fascinating
story of the attempts to re-create the ancient athletic contest Aonach Tailteann
as a symbol of the new Ireland. Equally, though, he shows the limits of such
appeals to the past. Ironically, those aspects of the re-created games that most
appealed to people were the least 'Irish', indeed they were ultra-modern, with
a whiff of the futurist: '[T]he pull of the motorcycle was greater than the pull
of the hurley stick', says Cronin. The contemporaneous new state of the Soviet
Union similarly sought its new sports, with much attention directed to recre-
ational forms that offered an alternative to 'western' and 'bourgeois' models,
with their emphasis on competition and record-breaking. But as Barbara Keys
reveals in her article, this revolutionary idealism, so evident in the 1920s,
withered - as did so much else - in the deadening grip of Stalin's domestic
and foreign politics. The result was that by the late 1930s the country was
adopting western professionalized practices in sport, just as in the economy
itself capitalism was being re-embedded under the aegis of the state. Douglas
Booth's study of the varied pressures brought to bear on the racialist regime in
South Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s represents a further example of
state-building, in this case related to the creation of the post-apartheid society.
He traces the shifting objectives of the sport boycott campaign and assesses its
effectiveness, sceptically concluding that in the final analysis it failed black
sportspeople; '[I]t is hardly surprising . . . that South Africa continues to send
predominantly white representative teams abroad while sports development
programmes in the townships languish.' A revolution manque perhaps?
On a different tack, the two remaining articles in this collection bring the
issue of gender to the fore. In an interesting and innovative piece Mark
Dyreson examines the ambiguous position occupied by American women in
the related growth of sport and consumerism after the first world war. Female
athletes, Dyreson avers, were both icons of emancipation, exemplifying the
new-found political and athletic status enjoyed by women, and objects of
desire, their images exploited by advertisers in much the same way as film
stars. Though scarcely a process of nation-building in the conventional sense,
the developments traced by Dyreson do link with those explored by many of
his companions in this issue; he deals with notions of community, and in this
case with the means by which women were accorded a place in that commu-
nity. According - or more properly restoring to - a place in the community
is also the theme of Julie Anderson's novel approach to sport. She deals with
its role in rehabilitating severely injured servicemen during and after the
second world war, focusing on the work of Ludwig Guttmann at Stoke
Mandeville hospital. In addition to repairing the damaged male breadwinner,
however, there was, says Anderson, a political imperative: 'The ultimate aim
was full rehabilitation and a reintegration into the community through
employment. . . transforming paralysed ex-servicemen into taxpayers.'
Each of these articles makes an important contribution to questions of
state-building and national community, and they will remind 'mainstream'
historians that sport as a subject of analysis cannot be marginalized in the way

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360 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 3

it has often been in the past. At several points the research makes connection
with work done outside the domain of sport. In this sense, at least, the articles
serve to re-orientate our approach to Guttmann's 'intersection'. Do they, in
any other senses, prompt new thoughts? I think they do, if sometimes for what
they imply rather than for what they explicitly state. In almost all cases the
authors handle their sources in a conventional way, by which I mean the
empirical method that has become the orthodoxy in historical practice.
Guttmann hints at Foucauldian and 'postmodern' influences at work in sports
sociology - not history - though none of these influences could be said truly
to have infiltrated the present collection. Dyreson comes closest, I feel, recog-
nizing that gender and gender relations are essentially matters of representa-
tion, and he interrogates his sources accordingly. His work stands comparison
with that of his compatriot Michael Oriard, whose brilliant analyses of the
representation of sport in the American media are unique in their bringing
together of cultural theory, empirical evidence and historical contexts.
Dyreson does not yet exhibit Oriard's adeptness in this juggling act but the
influence is clearly there, and the comparison does him credit."1 For their part,
Cronin and Dimeo both imply that the issue of nation-building is funda-
mentally connected with ideology, though each stops short of a full-blooded
exploration of it. Did Muslim football clubs 'express' communalism purely
through being peopled by Muslim players and spectators? And what caused
Irish people to decode the 'meaning' of Aonach Tailteann in a form different
from the intended messages of the authors of the games? There are issues of
how meaning is constructed and communicated here.
Such issues present themselves to anyone else working in these areas. They
pose a further and fundamental question for all historians who bring the sub-
ject of sport into their field of enquiry. What is the purpose of studying it? For
many, the answer is found in the illustrations sport provides of the historical
process. To take one example: the study of the emergence of a particular form
of football in Britain in the later-nineteenth century throws light onto a variety
of aspects of society - business opportunities, urban change, religious affilia-
tion, the scope of municipal government, changes in the system of communi-
cations, including the influence of the newspaper press, and so on. Thus,
research into sport may enrich our understanding of a wide range of develop-
ments, at the same time creating opportunities for investigating problems of
concern to other historians. The process thereby produces the dividend of
bringing sports history out of the cold and into the common weal of history.
Such endeavours have provided the stuff of a great deal of sports history in
recent years, an underlying concern having been to justify the study of sport.
Each of these aspects of research, though different from one another, is
nonetheless characterized by a conception of sport that is common to them all.

11 Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle
(Chapel Hill, NC 1993); idem, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and
Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, the Weekly and the Daily Press (Chapel Hill, NC 2001).

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Hill: Sport and Politics 361

Sport is perceived as something reflecting or illustrating other historical

processes. But what is lacking in this emphasis is any sense of sport being in
itself something capable of exerting social and cultural influence; of being a
process, a language, a system of meaning through which we know the world.
In short, historians have to determine whether issues such as these, which
depend crucially on the construction and communication of meaning, can be
resolved without considering in a serious way the question of 'discourse' and
its consequences for the historian's craft.12
These are some thoughts prompted by the articles. Since, however, it was
not the authors' intentions to strike out in all of these directions, it would be
unfair to criticize them for not doing so. Let me end by praising what is there
rather than regretting what might have been. What the authors have provided
us with is a body of original material offering new perspectives on the rela-
tionship between sport and politics. The scope is truly international. The
articles will bring to historians of sport and students of politics alike an injec-
tion of new ideas on the intersection between the two topics, and at the same
time assist a process of academic development which can only be for the
general good: namely, a convergence in interest and practice between sports
history and the other branches of the discipline.

12 Some of these issues are followed up in my Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century
Britain (Basingstoke 2002), chaps 1 and 11.

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