Journal of Historical Sociology Volume 24 Issue 4 2011 (Doi 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2011.01412.x) ALAN TOMLINSON CHRISTOPHER YOUNG - Sport in Modern European History - Trajectories, Constellations, Con

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No.
4 December 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2011.01412.x
Sport in Modern European History:

Trajectories, Constellations, Conjunctures1
johs_1412
409..427
ALAN TOMLINSON AND CHRISTOPHER YOUNG1

Abstract This essay reviews sport-related articles that have previously appeared in
the JHS, alongside a range of other historical works, and in so doing recognizes the
importance of persisting themes in the socio-cultural, historical analysis of sport.
Such themes have appeared in wide-ranging socio-historical and figurational work,
and also underpin the contributions to this special issue: they include the dynamics
of cultural importation, diffusion and appropriation; and the cultural significance of
sport in wider status and power relations. Emphasizing the compatibility of the
historical and the sociological imaginations, and confirming recent positions on the
integration of the cultural and the social in historical work, the article goes on to
contextualize the place of sport in Europe in the period from the later decades of the
nineteenth century into the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Referencing
classic debates on historical method and periodization particularly Braudels
discussions of event, conjuncture, and longue dure the article identifies core
conjunctural features of European sport in the period: internationalism/early globalization; increasing forms of mediatization; emergent individualism; and commercialized consumption and celebrity.
*****
1. Introduction
Historiography is both a social product and practice. Richard J.
Evans has noted how foreign policy studies boomed after World War
I, and the history of international relations became the most prestigious and best-funded branch of modern history at the time.2
Academic study trails and in historical terms tracks social
realities and problems. And whilst war and international conflict
are of course bigger issues and problems than sport, the historical
significance of sport and related leisure practices as sources of
social and cultural identity-formation, and forms of collective
expression of public culture and civic society, render them of far
more importance than has usually been recognized by the professional historical community. It is arguable, in an era of international sporting exchange on unprecedented levels and at a time
1
Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies and Director of Research
in the Centre for Sport Research, University of Brighton UK, Gaudick
Road, Eastbourne BN20 7SP, UK, a.tomlinson@brighton.ac.uk; Christopher Young is Reader in Modern and Medieval German Studies in the
Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge UK, and
Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, CB2 1RF, UK, cjy1000@cam.ac.uk
2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
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Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young
when sporting values are appropriated by global industries and

states, and so represent the highest of economic and political
stakes, that the historical understanding of sport and its legacies is
among the most serious questions of the day.
In line with the Journal of Historical Sociologys mission to
address the common subject matter of history and social studies,
whilst also provoking discussion and debate, this special issue on
Sport in Modern European History: Trajectories, Constellations,
Conjunctures considers the history of sports culture in the context
of the complex cultural, political and economic currents of the late
nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century.
The issue combines the framing of new research questions with
innovative case studies alert to historical and sociological sensitivities. The articles focus on the inter-cultural dynamics underlying
the growth of sports both nationally, and in international and
globalized contexts and forms, in the first three decades of the
twentieth century in particular, a period generally understood as
vital to the growth of modern sports but not always given its full
significance in scholarship. There are times when cultural currents
in different societies, separate as they appear, are closer to each
other, constituting a formation, when seen from afar, like constellations of bright stars. Our period in focus is one such historical
moment.
The journal has published important work on the cultural diffusion of sports: for instance, Dominic Malcolms study of the diffusion of cricket to America, which applies Eliasian perspectives
in an examination of the relational dynamics of the American
cricket figuration3; the same authors reflections on West Indian
cricketing style and the monopolization of the role of fast bowler
by black players4; and Daniel Bloyce and Patrick Murphys analysis
of baseball tours to England (1874, 1889, 1914 and 1924) led by
Albert Spalding, and other hopeful US entrepreneurs presented
as part of the broader human figuration of changes in US-British
relations and a case of a polymorphous approach to power as the
British public and press reacted with indifference to the prospect
of baseball becoming the summer sport of its established (association) football clubs.5 The journal has also published excellent
analyses of cycling, as a focus for debates concerning public order
and decorum countering rough-hewn masculinity in the Toronto
area in the last decade of the nineteenth century; and the nature
of associational exclusivity in male-dominated Victorian bicycle
clubs.6 Both the importance of gender as a determinant of the
new sport-based consumption and a gender-framed sport cultures
relation to class and status are reaffirmed in these analyses,
in effect confirming the insights of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre
2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No. 4 December 2011
Sport in Modern European History
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Bourdieu respectively on the nature of sport as a form of conspicuous consumption and sports powerful socio-cultural role as a
means of the expression of distinction and taste.7
This special issue complements such work, addressing persisting
themes in the socio-cultural, historical analysis of sport that are
shared with these valuable analyses: the dynamics of cultural
importation, diffusion and appropriation, and the cultural significance of sport in wider status and power relations. As such, the
issue looks to identify through detailed cases the key trajectories
characterizing European sport in an increasingly globalizing, and
USA-influenced, world. In so doing, the articles contribute to
themes prioritized by the journal, particularly consumerism
(Kerwin Klein on Alpine mountaineering, Jrgen Martschukat on
the engineered human body), identity/nationalism (Kasia Boddy on
boxing styles, Mike Cronin and Brian Conchubhair on language
and cultural power, and John Walton on Basque sports), and
space/time dynamics and configurations (present to some degree
in all the articles). In doing this, it has been important not to
forestall interpretive and theoretical debate; to foster empirical
open-mindedness (the opposite of empiricism); and to encourage
methodological innovation forms of sociologically informed thinking about history that are reflected upon in the dialogue with
Orlando Patterson that concludes the special issue. We believe our
topic calls for a theoretical eclecticism sympathetic to a range of
hermeneutic directions and possibilities, rather than a single theoretical framework or conceptual imperative that has sometimes
characterized the sociological history of sport strongly influenced
by Norbert Elias and sustained by successive generations of configurational, developmental, or process sociologists, several of
whom have contributed the articles on sport published by this
journal and referenced above.8 In this introduction, though, we
take the opportunity to consider more long-standing historiographical questions, before contextualizing the contributions in
relation to trajectories and constellations of sport-based cultures.
2. History and Sociology
In looking at the historical development of sport it is not sufficient
merely to document sporting practices, forms, institutions and the
like in their own self-referencing genealogical narrative.9 Sport, like
other popular cultural forms and practices such as film and
tourism, provides in its internationalizing phase a particularly
fruitful context in which to examine broader historical and social
trajectories beyond just the single national case; historical analysis
of the development of sport is inherently comparative as well as
412
historical. These premises underlie our approach to the question of

how to understand the place of sports in the European, and not just
the national, setting.
In the context of fierce intellectual debates concerning the challenge of the new social sciences to the established discipline of
history, Ferdinand Braudel wrote: A sociology of events . . . does
not record the direction, the speed or slowness, the ascent or
descent of the movement which carries along any social phenomenon.10 Social scientists, he believed, should engage with the long
time span. The historian, and certainly the historically informed
sociologist, should explore the dialectic of duration that is crucial
for grasping the crux of social reality . . . this living, intimate,
infinitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that
time which flows only slowly (p. 26). Braudel championed a history
of the longue dure, extended century-plus time-spans beyond the
traditional historical focus on the single event. The latter generated
too often a headlong, dramatic, breathless rush (p. 27) of a
narrative. He identified too a third kind of historical narrative, that
of the conjuncture, often a cycle, from a decade up to half a
century. But any such new history of conjunctures, he observed,
must make up a whole orchestra of the different rhythms of a
society and its culture (p. 30).
For Braudel, the history of the longue dure is the opposite of the
history of events. Social science has almost what amounts to a
horror of the event. And not without some justification, for the
short time span is the most capricious and the most delusive of all
(p. 28).11 But the historian, Braudel believed, must be aware of the
validity and interrelatedness of all three of these dimensions of
time. The articles in this special issue consider medium to broad
time spans of the conjunctural type, as well as particular moments
and events in the history of a sport. They recognize that both these
dimensions are necessary for an informed historical analysis of the
place of sport within the broader more long-term social formation
this latter being the long-term context of incipient globalization, or
even modernity. In contextualizing emergent forms of modern sport
in this way, identifying common or divergent features of sporting
cultures and forms across time and space, the collection prioritizes
historical sociology and sociologically informed history over and
above any single theory or method. It is aimed towards the production of solid knowledge that early British sociologists were called
upon to generate in order to gain serious academic recognition.12 In
this issue articles generate extremely solid knowledge of selected
national sport-cultural trends (in nationalist Ireland and Spanish
Basque Country), international sporting encounters and rivalries in
the boxing ring (in France and England in particular) and on the
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Alpine slopes, and cross-cultural ideologies of self-development

through physical culture. They also analyze simultaneously the
cultural and the social. In doing this, they embody the intimate
relation of history and sociology that C. Wright Mills recognized in
his discussion of the uses of history in his 1959 classic manifesto
for a critical and historically-rooted sociology.13 Mills observed that
only by an act of abstraction that unnecessarily violates social
reality can we try to freeze some knife-edge moment, and none of
the pieces in this collection runs the risk of such an error. However
close-up, focused and descriptively detailed the analysis of a particular sporting moment or practice, it is in all cases subject to
Millss key question: What are the salient trends?
3. Historical Sociology is Both Cultural and Social
Much has been made across the humanities and the social sciences
of the cultural turn, which has involved the application of initially
literary methodologies and concepts to historical moments and
formations, and an emphasis on human subjects as meaningmakers rather than recipients of imposed sets of values or ideologies. David Chaney points to four main themes that have been
established in the cultural turn under the influence of cultural
sociology/studies: cultural history and the study of cultural
change, en route to modernity; cultural reproduction, and the
question of how social order is sustained and reproduced through
time; cultural representation, the process whereby human experience is made meaningful; and consumption and style, referring to
processes whereby cultural phenomena are acquired and appropriated.14 Modern sport is featured prominently by Chaney in illustrative examples of three of these themes. Relating to cultural
history, it is seen as, simultaneously, a mass phenomenon expressing modern rationality and a form of symbolic identification of
imagined communities, its history providing an oblique commentary on the fictions of collective life.15 Within cultural representation, one of his examples is Leni Riefenstahls film of the 1936
Berlin Olympics and the layers of meanings that can be interpreted
within it. And as consumption, commercial and mass sport is
increasingly visible in modern life, an increasingly prominent social
and socio-economic institution, not merely an ephemeral cultural
practice. Though these examples of sport are presented in the
context of cultural sociology/studies, Chaney also includes within
his account a discussion of sociological theories of structuration,
recognizing quite rightly that cultures can be constitutive as well as
constituted; making as well as made. In this sense, the cultural
turn should not be too sharp a bend. Chaney has sought to
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overcome the divide between social history (broadly seen as the

history of social institutions shaping the society) and cultural
history (broadly seen as the history of everyday life or cultural
institutions or what in a Marxist sense is called the superstructure); social history, from this perspective, produced accounts of
the determining forces of the social formation, whilst cultural
history documented and interpreted the values and meanings of
cultural artifacts. The cultural must not be severed from the social,
and Chaneys cultural turn remains sensitive to the connection to
the social.
Journals such as the Journal of Historical Sociology have also
encouraged the transcendence of any such social-cultural split,
along with other titles such as Cultural and Social History. The
latter journal has argued that the cultural and the social should be
integrated, not separated; that research should not be bounded by
national frontiers; and that research in the field(s) should follow
the cultural turn to go beyond the community of historians to
cognate disciplines, both in the social sciences and the arts. The
articles in this special issue of Journal of Historical Sociology follow
these three tenets: first, we recognize sports constitutive as well as
determined nature, seeing the two categories of the social and the
cultural as inextricable. Sport as expressive practice and as an
institutional formation is simultaneously cultural and social; to
seek to analyze one without the other is to fragment according to
academic categories and a priori theory in disregard of the lived
human record. Second, the story of sport in modern Europe cannot
be told in single-nation isolation; the trans-national cultural flow of
international sport requires a global analytical reach and comparative historical analysis that can accrue from the juxtaposition of
cases, when not achieved in self-contained expansive crosscultural studies. And third, this special issue is premised on the
principle of interdisciplinary exchange and debate, in which historians, sociologists, linguists, and literary scholars draw upon a
range of sources and generate a range of methodological techniques
for exploring the social and cultural significance of sports cultures
and their meanings. For all of the contributions in the issue are
concerned with taking full account of the meanings of the sport
that made it so important to its practitioners, adherents and fans.
Such analysis shares with approaches in the cultural turn an
openness to what Miri Rubin (p. 90) calls a hybrid of critical
strategies.16 These throw light, she notes, on forms of communication, the ways in which practice and ideas circulate, and individual agency, and always attend to meaning. . . . To deal with
culture is thus to deal by definition with the mixing of categories,
for it is the system of meanings which makes order, ranks priority
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and suggests useful connections between things real, felt, and

imagined. But such a stress on meaning should never be at the
expense of an awareness of the context of production of culture and
the way in which culture(s) in turn contribute to socio-cultural
reproduction.
In the making of modern Europe, it is widely recognized, forms of
leisure holidays, travel, sport, music, communications have
been more than merely marginal in establishing cross-national
encounters and cross-cultural experiences. Peter Burke has written
of the invention of leisure in early modern Europe, noting the
impact of an increased awareness of the importance of consumption by economic historians, that has turned their attention
towards social and cultural history, and so raised the profile of
work on leisure and related aspects.17 But he also reviewed and
questioned what he saw as a central hypothesis of leisure/sport
studies: the assertion that there is a fundamental discontinuity
between pre-industrial and industrial society, in part based upon
the notion that the modern idea of leisure was lacking in the
pre-industrial context. He recognized four influential discourses
(medical, legal/political, religious/moral, educational) that shaped
and reframed perceptions of spare time that could make possible
the modern concept of leisure; pastimes and recreations, and attitudes towards them, were not just a consequence of such discourses, but were in part an element of them. Burke also identified
seven trends underlying the emergence of a modern conception of
leisure: guides to conduct began to concern themselves with recreation; how-to-do-it books multiplied, along with increased
awareness of Greek gymnastics and games and Roman circuses;
fine art brought leisure activities within its gaze; upper classes
cultivated leisure activities in a summer season; urban leisure
spaces gardens, playing courts, theatres emerged; ordinary
people got more free time; finally, reformers embraced rather than
opposed leisure. Burkes analysis of cultural change in early
modern Europe is not just a cultural analysis; it recognizes how
cultural phenomena are part and parcel of social institutions,
social relations, and socio-political discourses and regimes.
In this special issue we seek to frame the understanding of early
twentieth-century sport in Europe in such a fashion, asking in the
context of several European countries (mainly Britain, Germany,
France, Ireland, and Spain) and US-Europe connections and influences: what were the preconditions for and primary influences
upon the emergence and/or consolidation of sports in the period
from boxing spectacles to Alpine climbing, from the production of
idealized bodies to the lexicon of cricket in Ireland and the robustness of Basque sporting traditions? The answers to these questions
416
call for equal attention to be paid to social influences and cultural

meanings, for the integrated, interconnected analysis of the cultural in the social and the social in the cultural.
4. The Making of Sport in Europe: Longue Dure

or Conjuncture?
The contributions all take a particular sport or physical form or
practice in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and
consider the influences on the shaping, consolidation, and social
and cultural manifestation of the sport/form. One narrative orthodoxy locates the source of many of Europes, indeed the worlds,
adopted sporting forms and values in England, the cradle and
focus of modern sporting life, as Johann Huizinga phrased it.18 In
this narrative, a process of relatively simple diffusion was identified, one that created a common mass culture of sport primarily
enjoyed by men. But is this history of sport in Europe adequate? It
is clear that new sports with common rules, designed for the
confined urban spaces and the measured time of an industrial
culture, replaced the traditional folk games and older patterns of
collective festivity, and many new team sports such as association
football, rugby, and hockey and individual sports such as boxing,
mountaineering, athletics and tennis originated in Britain, the
catalyst of economic and social modernity, before spreading to
Europe. But how accurate is this as a narrative of European sport?
Without denying obvious influences or the increasing uniformity of
certain structures and rules, this special issue uses historical case
studies to challenge such a simplistic account of change and cultural growth. Three main dimensions of sport in this critical phase
of development must be recognized, in their inter-relatedness:
British sports impact and appropriation; meanings of new sporting
practices; and the intensifying internationalization of relations
between the USA and European countries. We consider these in
turn.
1. The process of the reception and appropriation of British sport.
Despite commonly held views, the cultural transmission, especially
the donor-recipient model postulating the export and implantation of sports from Britain to Europe, was not straightforward.
The individual peoples and states of Europe went their own way
in sport, borrowing selectively, appropriating and remodelling
British sports according to their own cultural needs, aspirations,
and ideologies. There has been a simplistic orthodoxy in much
history of sport concerning the diffusion of sport. Allen Guttmanns
Games and Empires concentrated on two aspects: geographical
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diffusion from nation to nation, and diffusion from one social

class to another.19 But any kind of process seems to fit this
conceptual schema, including the modernization of traditional
sports so that they come into conformity with established
modern forms. And much of such a diffusion debate has been seen
as a top-down process. Peter Borsays broad history of British
leisure picks up the debate on diffusion.20 He comments that in any
such model of cultural change the engine is social emulation and
the assumption is that it is present, to some degree, at all levels of
society. So culture travels downwards, almost automatically.
Borsay finds this a limiting model of diffusion. Obviously such a
model is open to criticism, not least as it robs the lower levels of
society of any cultural creativity of its own. Paul Willis has also
provided a counter to this tendency in his notion of the symbolic
creativity of everyday life, which allows him to talk of the grounded
aesthetics of everyday life, so that sensuous living processes
produce the yeast of common culture.21 The most convincing
analyses of the diffusion process identify the contradictions and
tensions of the dynamics and relations of cultural change; or, more
specifically, the key agents of change. Jason Kaufman and Orlando
Patterson, for instance, take the case of crickets lack of development in the USA, and specify the particular elite, along with its
entrepreneurial partners, that acts as the historical agent, as one
might put it, for the adoption and patronage of one sport rather
than another.22 In such an analysis, the cultural, social, political
and economic are one and the same thing at the pivotal moment of
change or conjuncture.
2. The emergence of distinctive sporting practices and the meanings
attributed to them. The end of the 19th and the first third of the
20th centuries also witnessed the creation or reaffirmation of a
wide range of new, indigenous forms of sport, ranging from the
re-invention of rural games in Ireland to the consolidation of Basque
pelota, and hybrid practices remaking mountaineering techniques
and traditions. The balance between tradition and modernity varied
across the societies and cultures of Europe. Building the nation
(from below as well as above) or affirming regional and religious
identities, such sports and practices revealed the complexity and
diversity of European culture in its formative phases and in relation
to modernity. Such distinctive sporting practices need to be documented, evidence of its practices subjected to careful hermeneutic
evaluation. If boxing was valued for the different style in which the
boxer fought, country by country or region by region, style should
not then be dismissed as a superficial characteristic; rather, it
should be recognized as an expressive cultural category of serious
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social significance in the meaning-making processes of the society.

It drew spectators and audiences, articulated national aspirations
and values. The analysis of the meanings attributed to the practice
by the founders, providers, participants and these of course are far
from shared in the process of culture-making should be a major
element of research into sport and physical cultures in any cultural
period, but particularly in one so formative as the early 20th century
in the making of national and supra-national sporting cultures.
3. The Americanization of European culture. Modern forms of sport
had been developing in parallel in the United States, indeed earlier
than in many European cases, as Alan Bairner has emphasized,
and in the early twentieth century these began to impact on
Europe.23 This was particularly so in the ways in which sports were
presented by the media, focused upon what Leo Lowenthal called
idols of consumption rather than production24; and perceived by
the public as stylish and strikingly modern in comparison to the
increasingly staid image of the older European and often British
model. Indeed important previous work on sport in Europe includes
the special issue of the The International Journal of the History of
Sport on European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport.25 The collection
leaned towards case studies of national heroes but provided valuable accounts of individual sporting lives and careers and the
influences that shaped them and the influences they had in turn
within their culture and society.
Were such figures harbingers of international change as well as
national change? To answer this necessitates a consideration of
not just the question of inter-European influences, but that of
US-Europe relations. Cross-Atlantic sporting tours and events were
economically and politically driven. The inter-war years were ones
in which, in various spheres, the long reach of the USA was
affecting national and regional cultures; sport was more than a
human activity or collective expression of local community life. It
was a focus for an expanding range of consumption practices.
Victoria de Grazia sees leisure (and sex) as among those activities
that have been insufficiently addressed by historians.26 For de
Grazia, sport would be a form of consumption that should be
discussed in terms of processes of commodification, spectatorship,
commercial exchanges, and social welfare reforms, processes that
involve the desire for and sale, purchase and use of durable and
nondurable goods, collective services, and images.27 In the making
of international consumerism, de Grazia argues, a dominant model
was emerging: that advanced by the United States. This model
established the predominance of individual acquisitiveness over
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collective entitlement and defined the measure of the good society

as private well-being achieved through consumer spending.28 To
understand the making of the sports cultures of modern Europe in
the inter-war period, this international influence must also be
acknowledged. Not all societies or nations would swallow the consumer pill at the same time or rate, as the story of sport in newly
independent Ireland shows so clearly. But no account of sport in
Europe of that time can afford to ignore this international dimension, in consideration of sports contribution to the making and
articulation of modernity.
The co-existence and increasingly overlapping influence of these
processes in the interwar period created a complex and richly
textured space (largely dominated by men) in which sport became
both (i) a mass phenomenon, often claimed to be linked to hegemonic cultural politics, and (ii) a vehicle for multiple personal,
social and national identities. This complexity of identity-formation
has often been neglected in favour of the recognition of sports
capacity to secure a cultural politics of consent. But the importance
of sport as a catalyst for the constitution of new forms, or the
reaffirmation of established forms, of identity may well be equally
important in any account of its phenomenally expanded cultural
and global profile through the rest of the century. We return to the
conjunctural characteristics of our period and this process after a
brief commentary on the six contributions.
5. The Contributions
In conversation with Orlando Patterson we speculated on the
nature of the historical sociologists task and challenge, confirming
too that historical sociology concentrating on particular events or
single sports but overlooking comparative cases will be too narrow
a focus. Recalling his early foray into the sociology of sport, Patterson notes how in cricket in the Caribbean there could be found
an intense distillation of every kind of problem and emotional
baggage carried by that society at that moment. He is advocating
the dual focus upon time/place and socio-cultural historical influence that is at the heart of the historical sociologists enterprise.
Cricket is both constituted by the legacies of a specific historical
past, and constituting of a potentially different future. Patterson
also draws upon his own experience of cricket in his childhood,
arguing that we come to enjoy what we know, rather than knowing
what we would like to enjoy. Patterson might sound closer than he
would like on this to Pierre Bourdieus theory of class habitus. But
his open-minded and wide-ranging thoughts on the mission of the
historical sociologist of sport are a reminder to some more narrowly
420
conceived forms of sport history that there remains much research

yet to be done on the broad trends in the making and reshaping of
modern sports in Europe, and on the different trajectories that have
been taken in the history of sport across national, inter-national
and supra-national contexts and settings.
Kasia Boddy raises the question of the speed of cultural innovation in sport, when a particular style was adopted in French boxing.
It was not the stand-up English style based upon leading with the
left hand that attracted the French, but the pacier, two-fisted,
head-forward, crouching style of US boxers. In this, not just boxing
matches were at stake. The nature of modern culture was being
fought out in the rings, and in France where the knockout was
only introduced in 1903 boxing soon offered a context in which
stagnant tradition and vital, versatile modernity were the broader
contested stakes. The American stylist was seen as the embodiment
of experimental progress, a man of developments. French fighter
Georges Carpentier demolished upstanding Englishman Bombardier Billy Wells, and when the inefficient shells of the British later
exploded unreliably in the trenches of World War I, they were
nicknamed Billy Wells. The devastating German howitzers were
called Jack Johnsons, after the black US boxer whose smile and
strength had so dazzled the French writer Collette.
This issue focuses upon the formative period in the emergence of
recognizably modern European sports, when the first international
fixtures took place in some sports and international organizations
were formed to administer newly standardized forms of sporting
competition. These were premised, in obvious fashion, upon the
spread, importation and adaptation of sports in different national
and regional cultures. Spain provides an illuminating case of subnational cultures that are simultaneously cross-national, in the
Catalan and Basque examples. John Walton homes in on the
Basque story in our period, in particular the case of pelota, but also
noting the distinctive style in which football was played when Spain
entered the international arena at the Antwerp Olympics in 1920,
where a significant number of Basque players contributed to a fast
and physical approach to the game. Within the Basque regions
themselves, though, fierce local rivalries and intra-regional tensions could also be claimed by nationalists as the personification of
a tough peasant culture surviving into the modern period. Yet
despite these cultural particularities, Walton shows that an
increasingly commercial sporting provision established a democratic accessibility to sports for expanding numbers of consumers.
Sport, as a site of ongoing negotiation in a transitional period, was
inevitably a hybrid cultural form even in the context of Basque
proto-nationalism.
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Sport and other types of exercise were closely connected in the

genesis of modern physical cultures, some in obviously ideologically driven forms such as the mass display of the authoritarian
state, others in relation to the military imperatives of individual
nations. But the work of Foucault has, in relation to the constitution of the subject and the self and the forms of governmentality
that can be achieved without the crude imposition of force, inspired
work on the ways in which sporting and exercising practices
embody the wider values and ideologies of the time. Taking the
barely substantiated yet influential views of Kathryn Blackford in
the United States, Jrgen Martschukat shows how models of body
and mind informed some of the discourses of manhood in earlytwentieth-century USA. Blackfords widely impacting manuals
linked the needs of the expansionist nation to the recommended
ideals of the individual male, a racialised ideal of a blend of bone
and muscle that could take the American project forward in multiple spheres, expressing a cultural superiority over the more
relaxed and supercilious British sportsman. Here again, as in the
case of the scientifically superior US boxing style adopted in
France, the new world articulated a model of modern physical
prowess that projected a self-developmental individualism which
was simultaneously a statement of collective strength. In this
context it could be explicitly claimed that the sportsman who could
balance brain and brawn was the perfect product of, and for, the
governing races. It is not that other, European countries overlooked this elision of racial superiority and physical culture; but
that US ideologues such as Blackford could use such formulae to
deliver a message of potential superiority.
A close consideration of the trajectory of individual sports shows
too that the influences and forces underpinning the place of a sport
in the wider society can be subtle and gradual, rather than traumatic and immediate. How we name cultural phenomena, whether
we include a practice in our daily routines or recognize it in our
daily lives, are important cultural forces or expressions of human
agency. Within contested political and cultural terrain, language is
all-important, as the argot of subcultures and countercultures
evidences. Cultural politics recognizes the absolute centrality of
language to power relations and not just social relations, and Mike
Cronin and Brian Conchubhairs examination of the treatment of
the term cricket by dictionary compilers in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Ireland is an innovative way of reaffirming
the importance of sport cultures in struggles concerning what is
culturally acceptable, or culturally pure, in a volatile socio-political
context. Cricket was popular in Ireland through to the end of the
nineteenth century. Excluding it from documentation of the Gaelic
422
language for half a century thereafter was an act of nationalist

cultural politics, erasing a popular pleasure from the records of
public meaning. It was not only modernization that shaped the
contours of accepted sporting practices in the first decades of the
twentieth century. Language, and the views taken of how to name
or un-name a sporting practice, are forces as yet little understood
in the history of modern sports.
Whatever the democratizing impulse of consumerism, political
and social determinants do not simply fade away. Kerwin Kleins
account of the shifting technologies of Alpine climbing tracks
the transformation of the Alps from the playground of British
gentlemen-scholars to a site for the expression of technologically
driven modernity and national prowess. Climbers were hailed as
national heroes in Nazi Germany, technical modernity going handin-hand with political degeneracy. For the traditional amateurs of
the mountains, this was all too much: The British denounced
pitoncraft as a Teutonic diversion, Klein observes, not even recognizing the ascent of Welsh slopes by Germans using the despised
technology. Klein shows what a careful semiotics of sporting practices can achieve, reading the meanings of the climbing techniques
from the changing relationship between the individual and technical apparatus, and capturing this in riveting interpretations of
specific bodily practices. Technical paraphernalia also fostered
expansive forms of consumerism, as represented in the magazine of
Prussian-born international strongman Eugene Sandow; a fashionable modernity of the mountains also stimulated tourism and film
markets.
6. The Conjuncture: Trajectories and Constellations
The articles in this special issue therefore explore in selected cases
a particular conjuncture of the longue dure of Europes emergent
modernity.29 Sport is shown to be a form of socio-cultural practice
of political and economic significance, varied and wide-ranging yet
identifiable as a constellation, in which the dynamics and nuances
of a national and regional culture co-exist with the trends of an
incipient globalization that shapes an expanding sports market.
When dealing with Europe, it is worth recalling Hobsbawms
warning to anyone looking to tackle the question of the continent
historically: There is no historically homogeneous Europe, and
those who look for it are on the wrong track. However we define
Europe, its diversity, the rise and fall, the co-existence, the dialectical interaction of its components, is fundamental to its existence.30 Within these dialectical interactions, then, what were the
salient features of European sport in the period, and can we point
423
to the characteristics of the conjuncture? The sociological trajectories that mark the conjuncture and that underpin the historical
development of European sport in the first third of the twentieth
century are:
internationalism/incipient globalization
intensifying mediatization
emergent individualism
the rise of celebrity and consumption
These also have their opposites (nationalism, live spectatorship,

mass cultural phenomena, the amateur or local hero), and there was
no one-way, even, or linear process in the making of European sport
of the time. A high-profile sporting event could look, from the
distance, like the masses at play, but also like spectators as individuals too. The period we study is the same conjunctural timeframe
covered by John Carey in his book on intellectuals and the masses,
in which he sought to question the very concept of the mass, which
he saw as a fiction, a linguistic device directed towards the elimination of the human status of the majority of the people.31 As sport
expanded its audiences and the geographical boundaries of its
markets, creating supra-national figures of heroic stature comparable with those produced by Hollywood, was it a contributor to mass
culture? Or did it offer or create new expressive spheres for individual choices, in which discriminating publics and communities
could choose what kind of sporting culture to patronise? Such
questions, pointing to ongoing tensions concerning the meaning and
direction of sport and physical culture, are clear to see in our case
studies. But it is not a matter of either/or, such as a modernization
model or even a periodized globalization framework might suggest.
Rather, sport cultures, forms, and practices embodied the subtleties
and complexities of socio-cultural change, often blending the new
and the old in the constitution of the contemporary and the modern.
The articles in this collection cannot address the whole span of
the story of Europe, but they confirm the importance of sport for
understanding a particular conjunctural phase in which nationstate rivalries, internationalizing communications and media,
emerging forms of international competition and administration,
and cross-national markets and economics laid a foundation for an
inexorable globalization of many sporting practices and forms
(often gendered and racialized32), and concomitantly, of aspects of
European culture itself. And yet the national persisted, the region
and the locality could in some cases hold on and rally, recreating
core values. Sports in modern Europe could express the ruptures of
the new as well as the nostalgia of tradition. Studying styles, bodily
practices, language, and regional politics, in our selected cases, is
424
more than the study of a peripheral sphere, and constitutes more

than a breathless headlong rush of unconnected events. In showing
some of the commonalities and contradictions of cross-cultural
sporting cultures and formations in the late nineteenth century and
up to the eve of World War II, this collection confirms both the
conjunctural significance of the period in the story of sport in
modern Europe and the importance of understanding sports contribution to the wider study of the international and intercultural
dynamics of a formative yet volatile time.
Notes
1
Most of the articles in this special issue have been developed from
contributions to and presentations made at symposia on Sport in Modern
Europe, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, supported by the UKs Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). See http://www.sport-ineurope.group.cam.ac.uk. We are grateful to the reviewers of this special
issue in particular Professor Alan Bairner who put an exemplary
amount of time and effort into their reviews, and contributed greatly to the
final shape of the special issue. Residual infelicities are, of course, the
responsibility of the individual authors and ourselves as editors. We are
also grateful to the third partner in the AHRC network, Richard Holt, for
stimulating intellectual exchange and collegial support during the period of
the network.
2
Richard J. Evans, British Historians and the European Continent
(Cambridge, 2009), p. 110.
3
Dominic Malcolm, The Diffusion of Cricket to America: A Figurational Sociological Examination, Journal of Historical Sociology, 19/2
(2006), p. 169.
4
Dominic Malcolm, Its not Cricket: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Inequalities, Journal of Historical Sociology, 14/3 (2002), p. 291.
5
Daniel Bloyce and Patrick Murphy, Baseball in England: A Case
of Prolonged Cultural Resistance, Journal of Historical Sociology, 21/1
(2008), p. 125.
6
Philip Gordon Macintosh, A Bourgeois Geography of Domestic Bicycling: Using Public Space Responsibly in Toronto and Niagara-on-theLake, Journal of Historical Sociology, 20/12 (2007), pp. 12657; and Glen
Norcliffe, Associations, Modernity and the Insider-citizens of a Victorian
Highwheel Bicycle Club, Journal of Historical Sociology, 19/2 (2006), pp.
12150.
7
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (London, 1986); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An
Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899).
8
Norbert Eliass contribution to the development of an historical
sociology of sport has been immense, and his influence has been cemented
by scholars such as Eric Dunning. We have no wish to question the
impressive status of crucial work in an emerging area. But a preoccupation
with the defence of a particular conceptual framework has undermined the
impact of later work in the field. See Wray Vamplew, Empiricist Versus
Sociological History: Some Comments on the Civilizing Process, Sport in
History, 27/2 (2007), pp. 16171, in which Vamplew takes to task Dominic
425
Malcolm for a less than rigorous use of empirical material, an overdependence on secondary sources, and a preoccupation with the corroboration of
a particular sociological (i.e. figurational) hypothesis. The concept, or at
least category of configuration, has a long history in comparative sociocultural studies, albeit in a relatively descriptive sense referring to the
times when certain cultural formations are identifiably significant and
influential in a society. See, for instance, the anthropological and culturehistorical approach of A.L. Kroeber, in Configurations of Culture Growth
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944).
9
Early attempts at historical synthesis or overview on the history of
physical education tended to do this, and produced little more than skeletal outlines of historical practices and forms. Milestones in the history or
story of physical education could be presented in descriptive periodisations
with no connecting strand or interpretive theme. See Charles A. Bucher,
Foundations of Physical Education Fourth Edition (Saint Louis, 1964), pp.
285312 in particular on Changing Concepts from Beginning of Modern
European Period to Present. At least Bucher, Professor of Physical Education at New York University, tried. A whole issue of Current Sociology
(15/3, The Sociology of Sport: A Trend Report and Bibliography) in 1967,
edited by Gnther Lschen, all but omitted history from the sociological
agenda. It got a mention when anthropological studies of primitive societies
were covered, and when some scholars work on historical method, or the
relevance of social-historical methods to social psychological or symbolic
interactionist studies, warranted inclusion. But nowhere in that issue was
the common ground of historical and sociological analysis acknowledged.
10
Ferdinand Braudel, On History (1969), trans. Sarah Matthews
(Chicago, 1980), pp. 7980. Succeeding quotations are from the essay on
History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Dure, pp. 2554 (originally
published in Annales E.S.C., 4 [October-December 1958]).
11
Braudels major works include ongoing reflections on his historical
method in a series of prefaces and some conclusions. See The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volumes 1 and 2
(1946), trans. Sin Reynolds (London, 1975), pp. 1621; and Capitalism
and Material Life 14001800 (1967), trans. Miriam Kochan (New York,
1973), pp. 15 and 44244. He consistently argued for a balanced analytical
approach to the understanding of the long-term structure of societies and
a focus upon the shorter-term realities of the conjuncture. A focus upon
the individual event could be exciting but also dangerous and misleading;
as he put it in the first volume of The Mediterranean, we must learn to
distrust this history with its still burning passions (p. 21). The challenge
remains, though, of integrating the close-reading of the event into the
analysis of the conjuncture.
12
Henry Sidgwick, president of Section F of the British Association,
called for this solid knowledge to overcome claims that sociology was no
more than an unreliable blend of personal prophesy and pseudo-science,
in which evidence was made to fit the theory. See Philip Abrams, The
Origins of British Sociology: 18341914 An Essay with Selected Papers
(Chicago and London, 1968), p. 83.
13
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth,
1970). The two quotations that follow are from p. 168.
14
David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London, 1994). On the application of the cultural
turn to sport events, in this case the new tradition of singing a song at the

426
English FA Cup final, see Jeffrey Hill, Cocks, Cats, Caps and Cups: A
Semiotic Approach to Sport and National Identity, Culture, Sport Society,
2/2 (1999), pp. 121. Hills reading of the meaning and resonances of the
collective rendition of Abide with Me might seem pretty mainstream to
veterans of the cultural turn, but he could write with confidence, in
relation to sport history, that empiricism retains a strong hold on what is
still a conservative discipline (p. 16).
15
Ibid., p. 55.
16
Miri Rubin, What is Cultural History Now?, in David Cannadine
(ed.), What is History Now? (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), p. 90.
17
Peter Burke, Viewpoint: The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern
Europe, Past & Present, 146 (1995), pp. 13650.
18
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of The Play Element in
Modern Culture (Boston, 1955), p. 197.
19
Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural
Imperialism (New York, 1994), pp. 10 and 11.
20
Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500
(Basingstoke, 2006), p. 98.
21
Paul Willis, Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday
Cultures of the Young, with Simon Jones, Joyce Canaan, and Geoff Hurd
(Milton Keynes, 1990). Willis further argues that symbolic work and creativity produce individual identities, place identities in larger wholes, and
affirm active senses of peoples vital capacities (pp. 1112). Willis celebrates experience from below as a dynamic force, and in his study of
motorbikers and hippies (Profane Culture, London, 1978, p. 1) he asserted
that the very existence of real, bustling, startling cultures or the
recognition of them can have serious epistemological consequences:
Real events can save us much philosophy. This was Williss version of
the position that one might take in the broader debate about structure
and agency that, in its European Marxist form, cast E.P. Thompson
against Louis Althusser. See Thompsons majestic polemic The Poverty of
Theory & Other Essays (London, 1978). In an insightful critique of
Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood touched on the relevance of these heady
debates to the understanding of sport and popular culture. She noted
how Thompsons primary interest in the persisting power of objective
class oppositions led him to an interest in popular customs, as these
latter, everyday social experiences, pleasurable as they might be, have
been shaped and transformed by the field and force of class. See The
Politics of Theory and the Concepts of Class: E.P. Thompson and his
Critics, Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review, 9 (1982), pp.
4575.
22
Jason Kaufmann and Orlando Patterson, Cross-national Cultural
Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket, American Sociological Review,
70/1 (2005), pp. 82110.
23
Alan Bairner, Sport, Nationalism, and Globalization: European and
North American Perspectives (Albany, NY, 2001), p. 95.
24
Leo Lowenthal, The Triumph of Mass Idols, in Literature, Popular
Culture, and Society (New Jersey, 1961).
25
J.A. Mangan, Richard Holt and Pierre Lanfranchi (eds), The International Journal of the History of Sport, 13/1 (1996).
26
Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things:
Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. (Berkeley, 1996). The
inter-war period in the USA has been blamed for many things. Johan

427
Huizinga commented that sport, which in his view had a spiritual value of
enormous weight, was ruined by the forces of mechanization that shaped
the immense sport organizations of football and baseball. See Johan
Huizinga, America: A Dutch Historians Vision, from Afar and Near, trans.,
with an introduction and notes, by Herbert H. Rowen (New York, 1972), p.
115. David Riesmans brilliant oxymoron the lonely crowd identified the
move from the inner-directed production-oriented personality to the
outer-directed type interested more and more in ever expanding frontiers of production. Hot-rodders were one of his main examples, and the
new forms of sport consumption available in the 1920s and 1930s could
have provided still more convincing cases. See David Riesman (with
Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney), The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character (New York, 1953, first published Cambridge,
MA, 1950).
27
De Grazia, The Sex of Things, p. 4.
28
Ibid., p. 5.
29
There is, of course, a vast literature on the question of modernity.
Brian Stock has argued in Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past
(Philadelphia, 1990) that: Tradition and modernity are the most troubling
concepts in cultural analysis. We are never quite sure what they mean (p.
159). But sometimes the most important conceptual and analytical categories are the least precise, and much depends upon the scope and scale
of the application of the concept. For an historians sympathetic review of
some specialist sociologists of leisure/sports approach to the question of
the phases of modernity, see Borsay, History of Leisure, pp. 22021.
30
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), p. 226. On the different
models of European sport history and development that vie for the historians attention, see Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young, Towards a
New History of European Sport, European Review, 19/4 (2011), pp. 487
507.
31
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice
among the Literary Intelligentsia, 18801939 (London, 1992), preface
[unpaginated].
32
For instance, the technical accomplishments of British flier (aviatrix)
Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly from Britain to Australia, were
over-ridden by the medias portrayal of her as a glamorous society woman/
lady, more manicured than manual and skilled (see Max Jones, What
Should Historians do with Heroes? Reflections on Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Britain, History Compass, 5/2 (2007), pp. 43954; and
the fights between boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling pitched black
American versus white Aryan, prompting USA journalist Bob Consedine to
write, in an implicit critique of Nazi racism, of Louiss 1938 knockout blow
that his nostrils were, at the point of punching Schmeling to defeat, like
the mouth of a double-barrelled shotgun. See John Carey (ed.), The Faber
Book of Reportage (London, 1987), p. 524.


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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No.

Sport in Modern European History:

ALAN TOMLINSON AND CHRISTOPHER YOUNG1

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

when sporting values are appropriated by global industries and

Sport in Modern European History

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

historical. These premises underlie our approach to the question of

Sport in Modern European History

Alpine slopes, and cross-cultural ideologies of self-development

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

overcome the divide between social history (broadly seen as the

Sport in Modern European History

and suggests useful connections between things real, felt, and

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

call for equal attention to be paid to social influences and cultural

4. The Making of Sport in Europe: Longue Dure

Sport in Modern European History

diffusion from nation to nation, and diffusion from one social

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

social significance in the meaning-making processes of the society.

Sport in Modern European History

collective entitlement and defined the measure of the good society

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

conceived forms of sport history that there remains much research

Sport in Modern European History

Sport and other types of exercise were closely connected in the

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

language for half a century thereafter was an act of nationalist

Sport in Modern European History

These also have their opposites (nationalism, live spectatorship,

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

more than the study of a peripheral sphere, and constitutes more

Sport in Modern European History

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sport in Modern European History

2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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