Global and Transnational Sport

The eight chapters in this book explore more than 150 years of the development of several modern sports - baseball, basketball, cricket, football, handball, ice hockey and lacrosse - across the two Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe, some analysing a century of events since the mid-nineteenth century and some only a few years in the very present. Drawing on the methods of history, international relations, political science, and sociology, the contributing authors examine various theories of sporting globalization. The chapters take a balanced look at the concepts of the nation state and the connected world, which are the substantive core around which modern human society is ordered. They construct stories of entanglements and convergences, from within and without the nation state, in which the national and the non-national are not mutually exclusive. The key features of this collection are how cultural elements are introduced to sport, how changes are perceived, how sporting practices and institutions can be defined at geopolitical and other levels, how we might conceptualize the perimeter of judging the national-transnational or the local-translocal paradigms, and how we could complicate the understanding of sport/knowledge transfer by ascribing different degrees of importance to origin, process, purpose, outcome, personnel and network. This book is a multidisciplinary exploration into the development of modern sporting culture from global and transnational history perspectives. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Sport in Society.

Souvik Naha has a PhD in History from the ETH Zurich. His research has been published in journals such as International Journal of the History of Sport, Sport in Society, Soccer & Society, Sport in History, Economic and Political Weekly, as well as in various edited volumes. He is currently a guest lecturer in History at West Bengal State University, India, and the book review editor of Soccer & Society.

1. Introduction: 'Over the border and the gates'? Global and transnational sport Souvik Naha 2. Playing on the border: sport, borderlands and the North Atlantic, 1850-1950 Colin D. Howell and Daryl Leeworthy 3. The intercultural transfer of football: the contexts of Germany and Argentina Thomas Adam 4. Sport transfer over the channel: elitist migration and the advent of football and ice hockey in Switzerland Christian Koller 5. With or without cricket? The two lives of the English game in a decolonizing India Souvik Naha 6. Did South America foster European football?: transnational influences on the continentalization of FIFA and the creation of UEFA, 1926-1959 Philippe Vonnard and Grégory Quin 7. 'Yes to Football, No to Torture!' The politics of the 1978 Football World Cup in West Germany Felix A. Jiménez Botta 8. Learning in landscapes of professional sports: transnational perspectives on talent development and migration into Danish women's handball around the time of the financial crisis, 2004-2012 Sine Agergaard 9. We're all transnational now: sport in dynamic sociocultural environments David Rowe