Sport in Capitalist Society

A Short History

Tony Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135081980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

• Why are the Olympic Games the driving force behind a clampdown on civil liberties?
• What makes sport an unwavering ally of nationalism and militarism?
• Is sport the new opiate of the masses?

These and many other questions are answered in this new radical history of sport by leading historian of sport and society, Professor Tony Collins.

Tracing the history of modern sport from its origins in the burgeoning capitalist economy of mid-eighteenth century England to the globalised corporate sport of today, the book argues that, far from the purity of sport being 'corrupted' by capitalism, modern sport is as much a product of capitalism as the factory, the stock exchange and the unemployment line.

Based on original sources, the book explains how sport has been shaped and moulded by the major political and economic events of the past two centuries, such as the French Revolution, the rise of modern nationalism and imperialism, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War and the imposition of the neo-liberal agenda in the last decades of the twentieth century. It highlights the symbiotic relationship between the media and sport, from the simultaneous emergence of print capitalism and modern sport in Georgian England to the rise of Murdoch's global satellite television empire in the twenty-first century, and for the first time it explores the alternative, revolutionary models of sport in the early twentieth century.

Sport in a Capitalist Society is the first sustained attempt to explain the emergence of modern sport around the world as an integral part of the globalisation of capitalism. It is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the history or sociology of sport, or the social and cultural history of the modern world.

1

CAPITALISM AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN SPORT

The whole human species may be fairly considered and treated as jockeys, each running his race to the best advantage.

Anon., 1793.¹

Men and women have always played games. The impulse to play is as vital to human culture as the desire to sing, the urge to draw or the need to tell stories. As a form of physical exhilaration, group solidarity or downright sheer pleasure, games are common to almost all societies in almost all periods of history. Few things in everyday life have been taken quite so seriously as play.²

Games developed from humanity’s efforts to master nature and sustain life. Throwing contests emerged from the hunting of animals or the need to repel enemies. Running races evolved from tracking animals or maintaining communications between settlements. Combat games were derived from military skills. Often the dividing line between work and leisure was unclear and sometimes non-existent. For most people throughout most of human history, life was work and work was life. Games happened when this relationship was temporarily suspended, for example, after the completion of a harvest, and enjoyment could fleetingly take precedence over necessity.³

This pattern was replicated around the world and across all pre-industrial societies. Early games were sometimes non-competitive, occasionally non-physical and often intertwined with ritual activities. With rare exceptions, such as the games of the ancient Greek Olympics, it would be anachronistic to use the modern term ‘sport’ to describe them. The methods of play and meanings ascribed to these games were very different from today. They may have had a ceremonial, religious or ritual purpose. The idea of specialist players would almost certainly have been unknown. And winning was often not the purpose of play.⁴

For the great mass of the people, games and their role in society changed little over the centuries. But by the sixteenth century, three general categories of games had emerged. Some were adjuncts to military training, as can be seen in combat or equestrian sports such as archery or jousting. Others were linked to religious or other ritual events, for example, the community feasts and games known in Britain as Church Ales or the football matches staged on religious holidays such as Christmas or Shrove Tuesday. And there were games played at fairs or festivals, such as Maypole dancing or smock racing, as women’s running races were known.⁵ Of course, there were also many games that were played when people simply had spare time on their hands, some more spontaneous and ad hoc than others.

These categories were not mutually exclusive. They overlapped and sometimes merged into each other. Medieval elites often used their extensive leisure time to develop sophisticated contests, and the richest could afford to employ professional practitioners and coaches of fencing, real tennis, horsemanship and other games.⁶ But all of these activities differed from the modern sports in that they were not generally codified, organised on a commercial basis nor seen as separate from everyday life. Gambling would sometimes take place and pub landlords, on whose land sports were often staged, could capitalise on the opportunities for increased drink and food sales. Yet before the eighteenth century these were largely incidental factors and did not provide the impetus nor the structure for the development of games as a separate and distinct sphere of cultural life.

But from the start of the 1700s, the nature of the most prominent games in Britain began to change. By the 1750s a fundamental and qualitative shift in the nature of the three most prominent British sports – horse racing, boxing and cricket – was taking place. Although they had their roots in the rural sports of the past, these games began to differ markedly from their predecessors. What now distinguished them from their rural antecedents was the emergence of generalised rules of play and their ability to systematically and regularly generate revenue. In short, these sports were becoming commodities, which one might pay to watch, be paid to play or upon which one could gamble significantly large amounts of money. Modern sport as we know it today was beginning to emerge.

How therefore do we explain the fact that modern sport developed first in what George Orwell described as ‘a cold and unimportant little island’ on the north-west coast of Europe?⁷ And why at this moment in history?

It was not because the British were more sports-loving than their European neighbours. Other European nations had similar strong traditions of games. Local sporting customs can be found in almost every region of early modern Europe, from Calcio, the elaborate Italian football game of Florence, to simple running and jumping games found across the continent. Bull-fighting in Spain reflected the popularity of blood sports across the western world, which in Britain was highlighted by cock-fighting and bull-baiting. France in particular had a strong tradition of games similar to that of Britain. Soule, a ball game played between parishes and other local communities, was common in northern France. Savate was a popular form of combat not unlike modern kick-boxing. Jeu de paume was a medieval forerunner of tennis.⁸ Jeu de mail used a mallet to propel a ball in a similar way to croquet.⁹ Moreover, like the British nobility, the French aristocracy were keen and conspicuous gamblers. An observer in the early seventeenth century would have noticed little difference between sporting habits on either side of the English Channel.

Yet neither France nor any other nation would see their traditional games provide the basis for the sporting revolution that swept Europe and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only those sports that originated in their modern form in Britain, or that were based on the British model, played this role. Even those American games that were to become major sports of the twentieth century – the rugby-derived American football, the traditional English game of baseball and the Muscular Christian-invented basketball – had their roots in Britain.¹⁰ In contrast to Europe, American sport was chronically underdeveloped and anaemic until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, if played at all.¹¹ Britain’s centrality to the birth of modern sport can be seen in the way that previously rural traditional games were transformed by the economic and social changes that were taking place in the British Isles in the eighteenth century.

In the eighteenth century Britain was an emerging capitalist, but not yet industrial, economy.¹² The last vestiges of feudalism in the countryside were being extinguished. Over the previous two centuries, the nature of the economy and society had changed dramatically. In contrast to the rest of Europe, agriculture was in the main no longer organised according to the fixed hierarchic traditions of feudalism but run on a profit-driven capitalist basis by its aristocratic landowners. The English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century had disposed of the remaining economic detritus of feudalism. Competition for leases, land and work became the norm. Unlike their European cousins, English aristocrats now measured themselves not by the size of their retinue but by their wealth. This was an economy organised to generate profit, whether in town or countryside, at home or abroad, or in leisure and recreation.

Due to the different trajectory that the economic development of agriculture had taken in Britain, and especially in England, the aristocracy’s attitude to money differed sharply from that of the European nobility. The British had much more of it, not only from agriculture but also from war profits, government contracts, stock market speculation and overseas investments in the newly acquired British Empire. Moreover, the long and deep-rooted tradition of extravagant aristocratic gambling dating back at least to Elizabethan times dovetailed with the new mania for financial speculation. As Lawrence Stone highlighted, for the aristocracy there was ‘no psychological difference between placing £100 on the throw of the dice and investing it in a risky voyage of exploration, between buying a share in the Virginia Company and backing a horse’.¹³ Aristocratic status in Britain was demonstrated not only by conspicuous consumption but also by flamboyant disposal, especially by the younger scions of the aristocracy for whom gambling was a symbol of inexhaustible wealth, masculine excess and endless leisure time. In 1750 the Duke of Cumberland lost £10, 000 on the disputed fight between Jack Broughton and Jack Slack.¹⁴ This was by no means unusual nor, by a long way, the largest sum to be lost on a sporting wager.

In contrast to Europe, where the aristocracy still stood firmly on its feudal, pre-capitalist foundations and did not share the monetary imperative found across the Channel – the French aristocracy’s love of gambling had been severely tempered by the shocking collapse of John Law’s speculative Mississippi Company in 1720 – British aristocratic patronage of sport grew enormously in the eighteenth century.¹⁵ Until the end of the Napoleonic wars much of sport was effectively controlled by ‘The Fancy’, an informal network of aristocrats, gentry and their hangers-on. By 1751 Henry Fielding was noting that ‘to the upper part of mankind, time is an enemy, and … their chieflabour is to kill it’.¹⁶ The aristocracy’s abandonment of militaristic feudal recreations such as archery, jousting and the tournament sports so beloved by Henry VIII was not because the aristocracy had become peace-loving. With the exception of the 1730s, eighteenth-century Britain rarely had a year without an overseas war, and some sporting aristocrats combined both military and sporting interests, most notably the Duke of Cumberland, known as the Butcher of Culloden for his bloody retribution on the Scots in 1746. Rather, feudal militarist sports no longer reflected the culture ofthe aristocracy. To compete, to win, to profit. As in business, these were now the goals of the sport-loving British aristocracy.

This transformation of Britain into a capitalist economy was reflected by the emergence of ideas of self-interest and competition in political and cultural life. During the late seventeenth century the idea that human nature was inherently selfish and competitive came to dominate philosophical and economic discussion. Its greatest advocate was Thomas Hobbes, who argued in Leviathan (1651) that the natural state of humanity was a ‘war of all against all’.¹⁷ This belief broke sharply with older conceptions of human nature based on Christian ideas of unchanging hierarchy, duty and obligation. Indeed, the term ‘human nature’ itself did not enter common usage until the eighteenth century. By 1700 economic theory was squarely based on the assumption that individuals acted in their own self-interest.¹⁸

This became the dominant view of social life in the eighteenth century. It was perhaps most elegantly conveyed by Alexander Pope in his 1733 Essay on Man: ‘Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul/Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole’.¹⁹ Its rawest exposition could be found in the work of Bernard Mandeville, who in his The Fable of the Bees and other works outlined a vision of society governed only by the self-interest of individuals. Without the guiding principle of self-interest, ‘society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved, ’ he wrote in his 1723 ‘Search into the Nature of Society’.²⁰ Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) owed much of their popularity to the timeliness of their discussions of this changing relationship between the individual and society. Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) offered a rather more rambunctious exploration of the same issue as Moll seeks to profit from her body. By 1776, Adam Smith’s assertion in The Wealth of Nations that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest, ’ would have appeared to be completely uncontentious to the majority of his readers.²¹

Sport, an activity that was by its very nature a competitive win—lose binary, therefore underwent a social amplification of its importance. Man against man (women were rarely considered), whether in the prize-fighting ring, on the race-course or in the cricket team, was no longer merely a recreational pleasure. It was now also a metaphor for, and a reflection of, everyday life in capitalist society.²²

The novel idea that sport was analogous to life itself – unthinkable in any previous age when games were merely diversions from life’s cares – was summed up by an anonymous author of doggerel in the early nineteenth century:

Now, life to me, has always seem’d a game –

Not a game of chance, but one where skill,

Will often throw the chances in our way …²³

Drawing this analogy between sport and life became increasingly common for writers and journalists. The very first sporting monthly, the Sporting Magazine (1792), proclaimed itself to be the journal for ‘the Man of Pleasure and Enterprize [sic]’ on its masthead. ‘The whole human species may be fairly considered and treated as jockeys, each running his race to the best advantage, ’ wrote the author of The Jockey Club, or A Sketch of the Manners of the Age in 1793.²⁴ Pierce Egan, the Regency journalist whose talent for penmanship and self-promotion reshaped sports writing into something more than a mere narrative of events, argued in Pancratia, his 1812 outline of boxing history, that explorers had discovered that ‘those in continuous hostility, cherished with ardour every gymnastic sport’.²⁵ And the 1824 version of Boxiana, his grandiloquent chronicle of prize-fighting, even began with a quotation from The Wealth of Nations.²⁶

Sport was merely one example of the way in which leisure in general was being commercialised in the eighteenth century. For the first time, leisure activities offered extensive and regular opportunities to make money – a nascent entertainment industry was emerging.²⁷ Spending power and leisure time expanded for the middle as well as the upper classes. The theatre, music and the arts all expanded greatly throu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Capitalism and the birth of modern sport
• 2 Class conflict and the decline of traditional games
• 3 Sport, nationalism and the French Revolution
• 4 The middle-class invention of amateurism
• 5 Women and the masculine kingdom of sport
• 6 The Victorian sporting industrial revolution
• 7 Sport and the age of empire
• 8 Unfair play: the racial politics of sport
• 9 Soccer's rise to globalism
• 10 The second revolution: sport between the world wars
• 11 Revolutionary sport
• 12 Sex, drugs and sport in the Cold War
• 13 Taking sides in the 1960s
• 14 The revolution is being televised
• 15 Winners and losers: sport in the New World Order
• Conclusion: what future for sport?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index