The editors’ introduction notes: ‘James was certainly guilty of ignoring the exclusions that structured cricket as it was played, especially the heavily gendered nature of the sport and it is also the case that his account seems oddly inattentive to class’ (15). Impressively, the authors are respectful of James’ pivotal contribution to the Marxist analysis of sport but also explore aspects of his thought that fall short of a fully comprehensive materialist approach. The collected papers are linked to a conference held at Glasgow University in 2015 to mark the 50 th anniversary of James’ seminal text.

The authors of Marxism, Colonialism and Cricket usefully set themselves the task of trying to integrate the insights offered by these and other perspectives with the pioneering vision developed by James in a bygone era. However, in the decades following its publication, there have been multiple theoretical paradigms, such as feminism and postcolonialism, which have emerged to add layers of interpretation to our understanding of sport and its function in late capitalist society. Over half a century later, Beyond a Boundary remains the most important study of sport to have emerged from within the tradition of historical materialism.

As his protégé, Stuart Hall recalled: ‘James often remarked that the British said the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton and would be lost on the playing fields of Lords cricket ground’ (8). His crucial insight was to perceive that cricket’s translocation to the territories of the British Empire, including his native Trinidad, had unwittingly provided oppressed populations with an outlet to express their resistance to imperial hegemony. Intriguingly, it was perhaps his encounter with Hegelian dialectics in the 1930s that equipped him to adopt a historicised and nuanced approach to the dynamics of sport that had never occurred to any previous analyst.

Not the least remarkable aspect of James’ study was that the author applied decades of personal activism and theorisation within the revolutionary Marxist movement to his appreciation of what many had hitherto regarded as a sport virtually synonymous with the norms and values of the British ruling class.Įven without Beyond a Boundary, James would still be recognised today as one of the most creative and fertile minds to have been produced by the Trotskyist tradition. Hailed at the time by no less an authority than the quintessential voice of the game himself, John Arlott, as the ‘finest book written about the game of cricket’ (18), the trailblazing volume has become required reading in academic disciplines as diverse as aesthetics, cultural theory and sports studies. James’ Beyond a Boundary transformed not just the study of cricket but also the wider field of the relationship between sport and society.

Beyond a boundary by clr james