Thanks to those generous folks at Taylor and Francis the first 50 people to access my latest article, The ‘White Man’s Game’? West Indian Cricket Tours of the 1900s can access the article for free at the link below …

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/pFQ2VR6CR42ynrWFdWVC/full

It’s not just for academic specialists, I think the general reader who is interested in the history of cricket, the Caribbean or the British Empire would find it worth a look. I would write a summary here but it’s easier to reprint the abstract …

The 1900s saw two tours of the United Kingdom (UK) by a mixed race cricket team representing the West Indies. This paper argues that the tours were part of a concerted cultural campaign largely organized by the West India Committee to raise the profile of the British West Indian colonies in the Mother Country in the light of competition for favour among the settler colonies. It analyzes the selection of the team and its reception in the UK to argue that the existing literature has been mistaken in portraying the team to have been subject to consistent hostility due to the inclusion of black players in the touring party. Rather it is argued that the team of 1900 was largely welcomed as a truly representative West Indian team but that by 1906 a tightening of the definition of who could represent the empire on the sports field, influenced by the settlement of the South Africa War, meant that mixed race cricket would be rejected and the West Indians unjustly excluded from the Imperial Cricket Conference, which became an all whites club.

I should also warn that it discusses a distasteful, racist cartoon from the Edwardian period whose significance in the coverage of the tour I question. And I balance that illustration with some more positive coverage of the first West Indian teams to tour the UK in the 1900s.

#cricket #westindies

Academia cricket History London Sport West Indies CLR James cricket history International Journal of the History of Sport Sport West Indies