Wellyopolis

May 02, 2005

Cricket and the colonies

From one exciting topic (taxes) to another ... (via Crooked Timber, where the comments are the usual collection of the inane prattling to the academy)

Orlando Patterson and Jason Kaufman (elder statesman and rising thing young, respectively, in the Harvard Sociology Department) had a piece in the New York Times yesterday (illegal PDF copy here for future reference) that purports to explain why cricket faded into obscurity in North America (yes, that includes Canada) but is wildly popular in Australasia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, "the subcontinent" (i.e; Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and the West Indies.

Their thesis, simply stated, is:

Cricket lost ground in North America because of the egalitarian ethos of its societies.

Frankly, I don't get it. Perhaps the article is a little clearer on this startling new interpretation of Australian and New Zealand social history, not to mention American, but it just isn't plausible to me. Regarding Australia, they say

....less glamorous roles like bowling and fielding were assigned to social inferiors while those of specialist batsmen and team captain were reserved for elites. Much the same was true of 19th-century Australia, at the time a highly stratified colony whose masses were descended from prisoners. Cricket helped antipodean elites cultivate their Englishness, but the size and isolation of their European settlements limited the extent to which they could be truly exclusive.

It may be true that "less glamorous roles like bowling and fielding were assigned to social inferiors while those of specialist batsmen and team captain were reserved for elites," but calling Australia a highly stratified colony misrepresents how contemporary 19th century Australians saw their own country, and how it actually was. Since the Australasian censuses were destroyed we'll never really know how fluid the social structure was in 19th century Australia and New Zealand (the US had a much more fluid social structure than Britain. We know that.). It's abundantly clear that the popular view in both Australia and New Zealand was that social mobility was a good thing, and that marked social distinctions were bad.

Moreover, can you really say that 19th century America was a more egalitarian place than Australia or New Zealand? You can if you willingly ignore how race is related to class, and if you want to pretend that some regions with a social ethos a little removed from egalitarianism (that would be the South) are not really part of America. In other words, you can't advance the argument that 19th century America was substantially more egalitarian than 19th century Australasia without appearing a little foolish.

I admire the authors' bold willingness to explain in 750 words why one great game flourished in one place and another great game flourished elsewhere, but if that is the best they can do it doesn't inspire great confidence in their research.

UPDATE (3 May 2005 @ 5.25pm CDT): Not only do Orlando Patterson and Jason Kaufman have a flawed interpretation of North American history but they also have a damned shaky model of Indian history too, according to Sepoy at Chapati Mystery. (Tip o' the hat to Ralph Luker for the Chapati Mystery link)

UPDATE II (4 May 2005 @ 11.00am CDT): Rob McDougall is more sympathetic to Patterson and Kaufman, and advances a more plausible argument for baseball's advance in North America -- good marketing.

Posted by robe0419 at May 2, 2005 09:30 PM | TrackBack
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