Cricket: Origins and the British Empire

No other British institution has been carried as far, and remade as thoroughly, as cricket. Rugby and association football have a more global playing base; the English language, the common law, and parliamentary procedure have a more obvious afterlife. But cricket is the cultural form in which the British Empire most clearly persists. To follow the ball from the Hambledon Club in the 1770s to the 2024 T20 World Cup in the United States and the West Indies is to follow a thread — interrupted, frayed, sometimes deliberately cut, never quite severed — that runs through every phase of modern imperial and post-imperial history.

C. L. R. James put the relationship bluntly in Beyond a Boundary (1963): “Cricket had arrived with Empire, and went wherever the English went.” The sentence is a starting point, not a conclusion. As Brian Stoddart argued in Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response (1988) and refined in Pioneers of Culture (2017), the imperial game was a story of export and appropriation in roughly equal measure. The Empire is gone; the cricket is not.

The Eighteenth-Century Origins

The earliest unambiguous references to cricket are English and date to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A 1598 Guildford court case records the coroner John Derrick testifying that, as a schoolboy at the Royal Grammar School of Guildford about fifty years earlier, he had played “creckett.” A 1611 Sussex case fined one George Brydges for playing cricket on a Sunday. By 1697 a newspaper report describes “a great match” played in Sussex for fifty guineas. By the early eighteenth century cricket was a substantial rural sport in the south-eastern counties, with betting, with crowds, and with a vocabulary — “over,” “innings,” “bat” — that was already mature.

The Hambledon Club, founded in Hampshire in the 1760s, was the first great club of the game. It played matches against an “All-England” XI; it developed the curved bat, the round-arm bowling style, and the three-stump wicket; it produced the first generation of great players — John Small, Thomas “Daddy” Brett, the painter George Lambert. The Hambledon era was the formative moment of English provincial cricket, and it was also, as Keith Sandiford argued in Cricket and the Victorians (1994), the period in which the social character of the game was set. The Hambledon cricketers were Hampshire gentry and yeoman farmers; the game they codified was theirs, and its exclusivity was not an accident.

The MCC and the Codification of the Game

The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded by Thomas Lord in 1787, succeeded Hambledon as the game’s governing authority and remained so for nearly two centuries. The 1788 revision of the Laws of Cricket, the 1835 revision, the 1864 legalisation of over-arm bowling, 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 new technique required a different body and produced a different spectacle. The Victorian professional cricketer, with his high action and his looping trajectory, was, in this sense, an MCC invention.

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 Export of Cricket to the Settler Colonies

The export of cricket followed the flag and the trade. The first recorded match in Australia was reportedly played at Sydney Cove in 1803, between the crews of two British ships. The Melbourne Cricket Club was founded in 1838; the Sydney Cricket Club in 1826. The Melbourne Cricket Ground, established in 1853, became the imperial game’s most famous colonial ground, and the 1877 Australia v. England match there was the first Test match. The contest that grew out of it — the Ashes, named after the obituary of English cricket in the Sporting Times in 1882 — became the imperial cricketing fixture.

South African cricket followed a different rhythm. The first recorded match, between British troops and local residents, was reportedly in 1808; the Western Province Cricket Club was founded in 1861; the first Test was in 1889 at St George’s Park, Port Elizabeth. The South African cricket establishment was, from the start, racially exclusive; the exclusion of non-white players from the leading competitions hardened into law after 1948, and the subsequent boycotts of 1968 to 1991 were the longest political dispute in the history of the imperial game.

Indian cricket had the earliest origins. The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded in 1792, by the East India Company, and the Bombay Gymkhana followed in 1875. The Parsees of Bombay, who took up cricket in the 1860s, were the first Indian community to tour England (in 1886, 1888, and 1890); the 1911 founding of the Board of Control for Cricket in India gave the Indian game its first national governing body, and the 1932 tour of England — captained by the Maharaja of Patiala, with Lala Amarnath as the leading Indian player — established India as a Test-playing nation.

The Imperial Cricket Conference and its Successors

The Imperial Cricket Conference, founded at Lord’s in 1909 by England, Australia, and South Africa, with the West Indies admitted the same year, 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 and New Zealand in 1930; it was renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965, the International Cricket Council in 1989, and 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 — were former colonies.

C. L. R. James and the Re-reading of the Inheritance

James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) is the indispensable work of the modern historiography. The book’s central argument — that the West Indian cricketer was the maker, not the recipient, of the imperial game — has been taken up and extended by Jack Williams, Hilary Beckles, and Stoddart. The point is not to deny the imperial inheritance. It is to insist that the game the West Indians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the Sri Lankans now play is theirs. As James wrote, in a passage that is the polemical core of the book:

“Cricket had arrived with Empire, and went wherever the English went. But it was not, and could never be, an English monopoly. Wherever the game took root, the people of the country took it up and made it their own, and that is what gives the game its extraordinary hold on the imagination of the West Indian people.”

The Empire is gone. The cricket is not. The BCCI, founded in 1928 with two members and a sub-committee, is now the wealthiest sporting body in the world; the Indian Premier League, founded in 2008, is the richest cricket tournament; the 2024 T20 World Cup was co-hosted by the United States and the West Indies. The imperial game has been, in a literal sense, decolonised — and remains the most vivid cultural inheritance of the British Empire.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of cricket has been transformed by C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963), Keith Sandiford’s Cricket and the Victorians (1994), Brian Stoddart’s Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response (1988) and Pioneers of Culture (2017), Jack Williams’s Cricket and Race (2001) and West Indian Cricket and the World (2019), and James Nauright’s Sports, Cultures, and Societies (2004). The earlier celebratory accounts — the centennial histories of the MCC, the centennial histories of the Australian and West Indian boards — 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: 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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