Cricket, empire and the making of modern Britain

If you were an 18^th-century European power in the business of empire, it was an economic project at its core. Economic exploitation, to be blunt. It was also a political project, and it relied upon principles of governance and control.

However, neither could take root without the existence of an ideological and cultural foundation.

One of the complex characteristics of imperialism – and this was particularly true of British and French expansion into the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – is that it is often built with a strong self-justificatory dimension.

It’s in this context that you might have heard the archaic phrase “civilising mission”, which was shorthand for the idea that the colonial powers were not simply self-interested and rapacious invaders who wanted to strip out vital commodities and draw upon unfree labour.

Instead, one quarter of the world’s surface was brought under British rule in what its proponents framed as an act of guidance towards a more progressive age.

So, how to spread your brand of civilisation? It was England at the centre of the British imperial project, and sport provided the stage for the public performance of Englishness. When they first arrived in a faraway land, British settlers were startlingly quick to establish their own sports and social clubs.

Foremost of these was the cricket club, of which examples date from the earliest days of the “Second Empire”: in India, the Calcutta Cricket Club (in the city now known as Kolkata) was founded in 1792, only five years after Marylebone Cricket Club in London, which still holds the copyright for The Laws of Cricket.

Those same laws provided a metaphor for the ideal of a rules-based society, and one in which the word of the umpire was final. Furthermore, to attain sporting success you were required to possess prized qualities: bravery and physicality, coupled with skill and artfulness, and a methodical application of technique.

Cricket, then, was viewed by the British and their colonial counterparts as the perfect showcase for the ‘civility’ they hoped to impose. Clubs became the centrepiece of social life for Europeans – men and women – and drew local crowds keen to see this strange spectacle unfold.

The British were pleased for them to watch. They did not intend for them to play.

But cricket being an outdoor sport, it was not long before observation turned to imitation. And over time, those local teams would go on to challenge and beat those put together by the colonial tourists. As a form of what Edward Said called “cultural imperialism”, cricket sowed the seeds of its own downfall.

The history of the British Empire - and the various parts of the world that came under its sovereignty - is a vast and multi-faceted area of research, which requires study by people specialist in those topics.

My expertise is in what might be described as the more parochial aspect of our imperial history. That is, the lasting influence on Britain – sometimes referred to as the ‘metropole’ of empire – itself.

It’s in that context that I have found the social and historical role of cricket to be more significant than I had ever thought likely.

During World War II, a vast amount of cricket was played on the ‘home front’ as a morale-boosting display of imperial unity. Black West Indian cricketers such as Learie Constantine became some of the most prominent of wartime public figures. In August 1943, he was feted by huge crowds at Lord’s cricket ground in London – some 40,000 people attended the match – and played before royalty and the media.

Revealing the contradictions and hypocrisies of imperial culture, this came just two days after an infamous incident at the Imperial Hotel when Constantine was racially abused and asked to leave the hotel by the management, for which he successfully sued them.

Later, in post-war Britain, the sport was perhaps at the apex of its popularity. It was played by men and women, across class divides and in both sprawling cities and sleepy villages. In fact, it was a topic of national conversation – and one of the most widespread themes was the spectacular rise to pre-eminence of the West Indies as an international outfit.

As a cluster of nations spread across a series of islands in the Anglophone Caribbean, the West Indies’ traditions and cultures vary from state-to-state. But cricket – and calypso music – are two cultural forms which cut across the region.

Even those who have never taken an interest in cricket are aware of the likes of the prolific Antiguan batsman Sir Vivian Richards and his West Indian team-mates, who brilliantly overcame all opposition (not least England) over a period of 25 years.

At this time, the narrative around the West Indian teams changed. First lauded as jolly “Calypso kings” from the Caribbean who entertained but rarely threatened established imperial hierarchies, as the West Indies began to win the British press turned to highly racialised language about “dark destroyers” who were upending the game’s traditions with the ‘brutal’ nature of their cricket.

This era of Caribbean cricket is part of the growth of a West Indian identity; it has a compelling narrative of anti-colonial resistance, the rising of an oppressed people to beat their colonial masters at their own game.

It’s a remarkable chapter. But it’s only a part of a wider and largely untold story.

The ‘Windrush’ label has a number of inadequacies, but for the purposes of this article it is widely used to refer to immigrants who arrived in Britain from its then Caribbean colonies from around 1948.

Towards the middle of the 1950s, those numbers started to rapidly increase. Many of these people came with the idea that they would go home after just a few years, but in time they made lives in Britain.

The stories that historians tell about this period tend to privilege formal political activism, whether of the liberal variety or the more radical anti-racist movement. These are vital components of the post-war black British experience. But under the surface, there’s a whole world of social and cultural activity that has arguably been undervalued in contemporary analysis.

What were the cornerstones of this social and cultural world? The church, food, music, and cricket – and among these, cricket was unique. As writer and broadcaster Mike Philips put it, cricket was ‘the one thing that wasn’t strange or alien to us and, I suspect, the one thing about us that was not strange and alien to the English.’

There is a supplementary element, too: cricket is a public spectacle. Almost all Caribbean teams in postwar England were ‘wandering’ sides – they had no home ground of their own. Instead, they played in public parks or at other teams’ grounds.

At the earliest stages of settlement, cricket thus saw West Indians ‘perform’ the culture in public and encouraged them to travel widely across England, connecting with other small groups of Caribbean settlers in cites like Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Bristol and London, as well as playing matches against ‘white’ teams in rural and urban settings.   

At this time, the Barbadian-born writer and poet George Lamming even described cricket as a religion – invented by the English, with the West Indians as its first disciples.

Superficially then, West Indians might have appeared well-positioned to ‘integrate’. They also spoke English; they were largely Christian; and they had received a colonial education about things like literature and British history.

Having arrived in Britain, found jobs and places to live, they wanted to play cricket. In fact, often people were tapped up: “You’re from Barbados, right? You’re playing in the works team on Saturday.”

Being a cricket-loving people socially elevated West Indians above other immigrants and non-white people from the wider empire at that specific point in history.

But that had its limits.

When West Indians sought to join cricket clubs, things were quite different. Their passion for the game and strong element of ‘cultural Englishness’ were not sufficient to integrate people into existing outfits; like other immigrants of that era, they met the visceral racism that we have so much evidence for in housing and work contexts.

As a result of this hostility, social segregation starts to take place. This might be classed as self-segregation, but in fact it is completely natural human behaviour: if you feel unwelcome in an existing group, you’re going to try to set up your own.

That meant that from an early stage you have the development of Caribbean sports and social clubs, of which cricket was the beating heart.

The fascinating thing about these clubs is that they aren’t just places for play and leisure. A case study from Manchester shows that these were places at which social capital was developed: people went to the cricket club because they loved the game, and it was a source of pride. When they were there, they would find all manner of advice and assistance in terms of employment, the law, housing loans and so on.

If you can name it, it was run through the cricket club.

The more I have explored this, the more the hinterland of social and cultural life emerges. To my mind, it has been almost ignored by most contemporary research. Yet it paints a deeper picture of early immigration to Britain, in which there is a huge swell of industrious self-help and self-organisation taking place from day one.

West Indian immigrants did not hang around for social elites to ‘integrate’ them, they got on with it themselves. Cricket was the basis for that.

As we have established, cricket had a unique role in forming social circles for Windrush arrivals (and, to some extent, other groups) upon their immigration to the UK.

Over the last few years, I sat on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), reporting on cricket and equalities for the England and Wales Cricket Board, and throughout this work the issue of England and Englishness continued to prove highly problematic.

To this day, cricket has shown itself to have a very particular issue in adjusting to a multicultural society.

This statement may seem surprising to some, in part because the likes of pace bowlers Chris Jordan and Jofra Archer are prominent in the sport. Both have Bajan origins but hold British passports, and they play and win for England at the highest level.

Yet there is an important distinction between having a handful of exceptional non-white cricketers in your squad, and implementing an egalitarian, meritocratic cricket pathway for English-born people of colour.

Relative to where we were in the 1990s, we now have very few cricketers from the African-Caribbean population. English-born people of South Asian origin have slightly greater representation, but not in proportion to those that play the game at the base of the ‘talent pathway’.

In addition to my work with the ICEC, I have been writing a new book: Windrush Cricket: Caribbean Migration and the Remaking of Postwar England, which is due for publication in spring 2025.

As implied above, I argue that England and Englishness has historically been able to accommodate ‘elite gentlemen’ cricketers as part of a multi-racial imperial family. In fact, doing so was seen as an affirmation of the imperial project.

But in an age of post-colonial immigration, the claims of non-white people to represent the national England cricket team have proven much harder to take forwards.

To achieve equity in this fantastic sport, shared by so many across national and cultural borders, it is clear we need a far deeper public debate about the imperial-era connection between cricket and Englishness and how, in the twenty-first century, we can finally move beyond its racial foundations.

Dr Michael Collins is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History and author of ‘Windrush Cricket: Caribbean Migration and the Remaking of Postwar England’ (Oxford University Press, Spring 2025). In this work he has collaborated closely with UCL scholar Montaz Marché, project lead for the Caribbean Cricket Archive.

Michael also oversaw development and delivery of UCL’s first-ever Summer School in India in June 2024, and his next book ‘After the Raj’ will look at a wide spectrum of Indo-British relations – economic, political, military, cultural, and sporting – since 1947.