British Sports History

Robert Colls rises to the challenge of arguing the case for sports history as a serious academic subject, digging deep into its beginnings in the 1960s and winning with a wealth of scholarly works and skilled rhetoric:

Unlike its European and American counterparts, the rise of British sports history as an academic subject in the 1960s came out of social history and theory, not physical education and sports science. That said, the most ambitious works were decidedly left field – Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) came out of cultural linguistics, Elias' The Civilizing Process (1939) out of sociology, economics, and psychotherapy and Guttmann's From Ritual to Record (1978) out of literature, history and American studies. With no clear theoretical lead, British social scientists could be found strapping sports history into hard-boned theories (Marxist, Functionalist or Figurationist) that did not always fit – though Dunning's and Sheard's Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (1979) was influential and deserves a prize for trying. Wray Vamplew's Pay Up and Play the Game (1988) introduced the Utility Maximisation Hypothesis, which was interesting, while Neil Tranter's Sport, Economy and Society (1998) sought to answer some of the big sociological-historical questions and did well by both disciplines. On the other hand, there was Desmond Morris' The Soccer Tribe (1981) that zoolo-anthropologised sport.






The social historians preferred specific events and established chronologies. James Walvin was first with The People's Game: The Social History of British Football (1975). I can remember the cries of 'folly' that followed the young Walvin as he tried to win the interest of York University's history department. After all, here was a man who had done his doctorate in a proper subject (popular radicalism) wasting his time (and his youth) on Manchester United. Forty years on, the book is still in print. Tony Mason's Association Football and English Society followed in 1981, while Tony Mangan brought the middle classes into sports history in the same year with his study of public school athleticism. But the ground for academic British sports history was really cleared with Dai Smith and Gareth Williams' Fields of Praise (1980), a 'deep' history of the Welsh, and with Richard Holt's Sport and the British (1989), a sweeping work which showed historians how to think about sport and how to cast it into the mainstream. In this context, we cannot signpost sports history without pointing to Keith Thomas' 'Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society' (Past & Present, 1964), R.W. Malcolmson's Popular Recreations in English Society (1973), Gareth Stedman Jones' 'Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics 1870-1900' (Journal of Social History, 1974) and Ross McKibbin's Classes and Cultures (1998).


http://www.historytoday.com/robert-colls/british-sports-history