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World of Sport examines the development of modern sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in the light of transnational approaches to history.
Critically probing existing studies and offering new insights, this volume demonstrates that while sport was a national and international phenomenon, it was invariably constructed transnationally. Taking in topics ranging from the dissemination of football codes to transpacific surfing cultures, and the touring lives of baseball and hockey players to the contact zones of international competition, it emphasises the importance of transnational perspectives in the way people around the globe experience sport. Like other forms of popular culture, sport cannot be properly understood without reference to the cross-national connections that helped to disseminate rules and regulations, circulated styles of play and performance, and drove forward regional and international competition.
Drawing on case studies that range time periods and continents, World of Sport is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the place of sport in the interconnected modern world and the transnational origins of the global sporting order in the twenty-first century.
List of contents
Introduction Part 1: Transnational and Connected Histories, c.1850-1945 Chapter 1: Migration Chapter 2: Touring Chapter 3: Communications Chapter 4: Competition Part 2: Transnational and Connected Histories, 1945-c.1970 Chapter 5: Connections and Disconnections in the Post-War World Conclusion
About the author
Matthew Taylor is Professor of History at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. He has written widely on the social, cultural and international history of sport. His publications include
Moving with the Ball: The Migration of Professional Footballers (2001, with Pierre Lanfranchi) and
Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-
45 (2020).
Summary
World of Sport examines the development of modern sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in the light of transnational approaches to history.
Report
'World of Sport is sports history at its best, where sport's chequered past is brought to life and we come closer to understand the most important of all the unessential but wonderful things humans dedicates their time to.'
Hans Bolling, idrottsforum.org (2025)
