Muscular Christianity and the Colonial and Post-Colonial World

This Volume explores the enormous impact the ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades: secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos - the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life - came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. This text demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

John J MacAloon is Professor and Deputy Dean of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He is author of the classic, The Great Symbol: Pierre De Coubertin and the origins of the modern Olympic Games.

Preface1. Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 Years 2. The Social Gospel and the Persistence of Muscular Christianity in Canada 3. Tom Brown in Pre- and Post-Colonial Japan: The Growth of a Hybrid 4. Yoga at the Fin-de-Siècle: Muscular Christianity with a Hindu Twist 5. Christ and the Imperial Playing Fields: Thomas Hughes's Ideological Heirs in Empire 6. Tom Brown Goes Global: The "Brown Ethic" and Colonial and Post-Colonial India 7. From Trobriand Cricket to Rugby Nation: The Mission of Sport in Papua, New Guinea8. Baseball and Decolonizaion: The Caribbean, 1945-75 9. From Martial Arts to Adventure Training: The Strenuous Ethic in China's New Corporate Culture 10. Dilemmas of Preserving the Muscular Christian Heritage in Rugby, Tennessee: An Interview with Barbara Stagg 11. Meanwhile in Britain: Muscular Christianity and the Crisis of "Englishness." 12. High Hopes and Hard Times: Modelling Society in Adventure based Education 13. Outward Bound and Inward Turn-Gender and the Muscular Christian Tradition