British Empire Development and the Making of Modern Cricket

Modern cricket is the joint product of three institutional innovations, each of them imperial. The 1864 legalisation of over-arm bowling, the 1890 formalisation of the County Championship, and the 1909 foundation of the Imperial Cricket Conference converted an English rural game into a contest of technique, a professionalised national competition, and a formal international tournament. None of these innovations was inevitable; all of them were, in the precise sense, the work of the British Empire.

C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian whose Beyond a Boundary (1963) remains the indispensable starting point, captured the dynamic in a sentence: “Cricket had arrived with Empire, and went wherever the English went.” But the sentence has to be read with the qualifier James attached to it. The English who took cricket to Trinidad, to Calcutta, to Cape Town, to Melbourne, and to Lahore did not, in the long run, own the game. The West Indian, the Indian, the South African, the Australian, and the Pakistani cricketer who played at Lord’s in the twentieth century was not a creature of the imperial game. He was its heir and, in time, its master.

The Eighteenth-Century Origins

The earliest form of modern cricket is the game played at the Hambledon Club in Hampshire in the 1760s and 1770s. The Hambledon Club was the first great club of English cricket: it played matches against an “All-England” XI, it developed the curved bat, the round-arm bowling style, and the three-stump wicket, and it produced the first generation of great players — John Small, Thomas “Daddy” Brett, the painter George Lambert, and the batsman Tom Sueter.

The Hambledon era was more than a phase of cricket history. It was, as Keith Sandiford argued in Cricket and the Victorians (1994), the formative moment of English provincial culture. The Hambledon Club was the institutional vehicle of the Hampshire gentry’s rural sociability, and the cricket it played was the social practice of a particular class. The Hambledon era was also the founding moment of English cricket’s social exclusivity: the Hambledon Club was, throughout its existence, a small and relatively exclusive body, and the cricket that it played was, throughout its existence, a small and relatively exclusive game. The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded by Thomas Lord in 1787, inherited this exclusivity. The Lord’s ground has, since 1814, been the spiritual home of the imperial game.

The MCC and the Codification of the Game

The MCC became the game’s governing authority through a series of revisions to the Laws of Cricket. The 1788 revision, the 1835 revision, the 1864 legalisation of over-arm bowling, the 1884 introduction of the follow-on rule, the 1947 (Australian) and 1979 (English) revisions of the over — each was the work of the MCC, and each was a moment in the standardisation of an English game for an imperial audience. The 1864 bowling law is the most important of these revisions. By legalising the delivery of the ball with the hand above the shoulder, the MCC closed off the round-arm era and opened the modern game.

The MCC’s role in the propagation of the game was equally institutional. The Club sent touring sides to North America in the 1850s, to Australia from 1861–62, to India from 1886, to South Africa from 1888–89, and to the West Indies from 1897. These were not, at first, international matches in the modern sense. They were imperial tours, organised by the metropolitan club, playing against local teams chosen on terms the MCC set. The imperial game was, in that sense, a London game played in the colonies.

The County Championship and the Professionalisation of the Game

The County Championship was, throughout the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, the institutional form in which English cricket was organised. The first county matches were played in the 1820s, but the competition was not formalised until 1890. The formalisation was the work of the MCC and the principal county clubs — Yorkshire (founded 1863), Lancashire (founded 1864), Middlesex (founded 1864), Nottinghamshire (founded 1841), and Surrey (founded 1845) — and it produced, for the first time, a professional class of cricketers that England could draw on.

The professionalisation of English cricket was, in this sense, the foundation of the imperial cricket project. The Yorkshire team of the 1890s — with Wilfred Rhodes, George Hirst, and Stanley Jackson — was, as Brian Stoddart argued in Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response (1988), the model for the imperial cricket team: a body of professional players, paid by a county, playing an international game codified by the MCC. The amateur-professional distinction that ran through English cricket until 1962 — the Gentleman and the Player — was the social form in which the imperial game’s class compromise was expressed. The 1962 abolition of the distinction was the post-imperial moment of English cricket.

The Imperial Cricket Conference

The Imperial Cricket Conference, founded at Lord’s in 1909 by the MCC, on the initiative of the Australian, South African, and West Indian boards, was the institutional crown of the imperial game. Its founding moment was an attempt to regularise a touring schedule that had grown haphazardly since the 1870s. Its principal business was to recognise the three metropolitan clubs — the MCC, the Australian Board, and the South African Board — as the game of the empire in its three principal centres.

The Conference admitted India in 1926, New Zealand in 1930, and Pakistan in 1952. It was renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965 and the International Cricket Council in 1989. The ICC moved its headquarters from Lord’s to Dubai in 2005. The renaming is more important than it looks: the imperial body that had been founded in 1909 to organise imperial tours had, by 1989, become the global governing body of a game in which England was one of twelve full members and the most powerful of the newer Test nations — India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe — were former colonies.

The West Indies, India, and the Re-making of the Imperial Game

The West Indies was the imperial game’s most extraordinary re-invention. The first West Indian team toured England in 1900; the 1928 tour, captained by Learie Constantine, was the moment when the West Indian game acquired its modern identity. C. L. R. James played club cricket in Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s, was a friend of Constantine, and was a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the 1930s. His Beyond a Boundary (1963) was, as Jack Williams argued in Cricket and Race (2001), “the founding text of modern cricket writing” — and the founding text of the West Indian game.

The West Indian team of 1960 to 1995 was the most successful national cricket team in the world over that period. The 1975 and 1979 Cricket World Cups, both won under Clive Lloyd by beating Australia and England in the finals at Lord’s, were the moments at which the West Indian game became a global possession. The 1976 tour of England, in which the West Indian fast bowlers — Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall, Colin Croft — established a pace attack of unprecedented ferocity, was the sporting expression of a Black Power confidence that had its political analogue in the Grenadian Revolution and the rise of the Caribbean trade-union Left.

The Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan games followed a similar trajectory with their own inflections. The 1932 Bodyline tour of Australia, in which the English team, captained by Douglas Jardine, bowled short-pitched deliveries at the Australian batsmen with leg-side fieldsmen massed to catch the resulting deflections, was the most controversial cricket tour in the history of the game. The controversy, as Jack Williams showed in Cricket and Race (2001) and West Indian Cricket and the World (2019), was, in part, a controversy about the racial and imperial character of the game: the Australian batsmen were, in 1932, predominantly white; the English bowlers were, in 1932, predominantly professional; and the Bodyline tactic was, in effect, a means of neutralising the Australian advantage by violent means.

The Indian game acquired its modern identity with the 1983 Cricket World Cup, won under Kapil Dev at Lord’s by beating the West Indies in the final; the Pakistani game with the 1992 Cricket World Cup, won under Imran Khan at the MCG by beating England in the final; the Sri Lankan game with the 1996 Cricket World Cup, won under Arjuna Ranatunga in Lahore. The 2007 T20 World Cup, won by India under M. S. Dhoni in Johannesburg, was the moment at which the shortest form of the imperial game was won by the country that had, in 1983, first established itself as a cricketing great power.

The Post-Imperial Game

The post-imperial game is the imperial game played in new forms. The 2011 Cricket World Cup, won by India under Dhoni at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai by beating Sri Lanka in the final, was held in the Indian subcontinent for the first time. The 2019 Cricket World Cup, won by England under Eoin Morgan at Lord’s by beating New Zealand in a final decided on a boundary count, was the first in which England won. The 2023 Cricket World Cup, won by Australia at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, was the first held in India for twelve years. The 2024 T20 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States and the West Indies, was the first held in North America. The Indian Premier League, founded in 2008, is the wealthiest cricket tournament in the world. The Big Bash League, the Pakistan Super League, the Caribbean Premier League, the SA20, and the Major League Cricket are the institutional forms through which the imperial game is, in the twenty-first century, played.

The Empire is gone. The cricket is not. The Bodyline series of 1932–33 was played in the imperial era; the 2005 Ashes were played in the post-imperial era; the 2023–24 Indian tour of England was played in the post-Brexit era. The game, in Brian Stoddart’s phrase, has been the imperial game’s most durable export and its most successful re-invention.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of modern cricket has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of C. L. R. James (Beyond a Boundary 1963), Keith Sandiford (Cricket and the Victorians 1994), Brian Stoddart (Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response 1988; Pioneers of Culture 2017), Jack Williams (Cricket and Race 2001; West Indian Cricket and the World 2019), and James Nauright (Sports, Cultures, and Societies 2004). The earlier celebratory accounts — the centennial histories of the MCC, the centennial histories of the County Championship, the Imperial Cricket Conference — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question is the same one James posed in 1963: how to weigh the imperial inheritance without denying the imperial achievement, and how to credit the colonial achievement without forgetting the imperial inheritance.

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