It is in many respects an opportune moment for the Journal of Global History to publish a special issue on sport. The London Olympics and Paralympics of 2012 were global sporting and media happenings on an extraordinary scale; mega-events whose images and narratives were circulated across the globe, generating millions of words of discussion and printed copy and endless comment and debate across the global social media. The transformation of the Olympic Games into a global sports spectacle, not to mention a commercial behemoth, during the twentieth century has been a highly significant cultural phenomenon. Like other sports mega-events that are ‘produced by alliances of the national state, regional politics, and the expansion of the global consumer market’, and involve the majority of the world's nations, the Olympics has had, and continues to have, a ‘worldwide impact’.Footnote ¹

Analysts of contemporary globalization have been drawn to mega-events such as the Olympics as the showpiece occasions of a rapidly globalizing sports world. The headline statistics of the Beijing Games of 2008 offer overwhelming supporting evidence. There were 204 nations involved in the opening ceremony, and 4.7 billion viewers, approximately 70% of the world's population, were estimated to have accessed television coverage. Meanwhile, over 32,000 journalists from across the globe made up the largest media contingent covering any event of any kind.Footnote ² With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that sociologists, in particular, have found considerable mileage in examining sport as an index of globalization. Writing in 2001, Toby Miller and colleagues argued that, rather than simply reflecting global trends, sport was in fact ‘big enough in its effects to modify our very use of the term globalization’.Footnote ³ A host of sociologically informed papers and books have taken similar starting points, although individual positions and conclusions have been finely variegated. Major studies on football's and baseball's connections to global processes have complemented analyses that have focused on the global dimensions of the media coverage, labour migration, international governance, and politics of contemporary sport.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, some of the leading theorists of globalization have co-written or authored major texts on global sport.Footnote ⁵

Historians, by contrast, have been slow to recognize that examining sport might help to deepen our understandings of globalizing processes and transnational linkages over time. There have been very few, if any, references to sport in general studies that adopt global and transnational approaches to the past. Those that do mention sport, such as Ian Tyrrell's Transnational nation, which considers it in the context of a broader discussion of how Americans, and American culture, ‘travelled’ abroad before the First World War, either dispatch it within a few paragraphs or else discuss it in the most generalized terms.Footnote ⁶ In part, at least, this reticence to reflect upon sport stems from broader cultural prejudices and structural boundaries. Despite considerable advances, many mainstream history journals and publishers still seem to be unaware of, or unconvinced by, the academic relevance of sport to major historiographical themes. National units of analysis have been especially resilient and slow to be broken down among historians of sport but there have been notable breakthroughs. Important scholarship has been produced on the uneven worldwide diffusion and ‘differential popularization’ of sports, and on the means by which sports were spread, and the degree to which they were accepted, resisted, or domesticated, through formal and informal empires.Footnote ⁷ Football, the so-called ‘world's game’, has unsurprisingly garnered its fair share of global histories, one of which was authored by a globalization specialist.Footnote ⁸ Barbara J. Keys's Globalizing sport, meanwhile, represents the most thorough and rigorous study of sport's global development in specific sites and within a particular timeframe.Footnote ⁹ Focusing on the 1930s, Keys utilizes the archival records of international sports bodies and national organizations in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States to argue for sport's effectiveness as a mediating influence between national and international identities.

Elsewhere, historians such as Christiane Eisenberg have drawn on cross-national perspectives to explore exchanges, borrowings, and connections between and across national and continental boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Others have focused on international mobility and migration among elite athletes from the late nineteenth century onwards, assessing the extent to which the patterns and processes of labour movement in sport corresponded with other cultural and entertainment industries.Footnote ¹¹ By and large, this work has been content to chart particular connections and exchanges between certain nations and regions rather than to scrutinize the underpinning chronologies favoured by sociologists of global sport. Indeed, the most influential periodization of sport's global development, adapted from Roland Robertson's more general work on globalization, has yet to be seriously examined or contested by historians.Footnote ¹²

This special issue does not claim to offer a comprehensive history or chronology of global sport. What it does aim to do, through a series of original case studies, is to retrieve sport from the margins of global history. Its focus is on the individuals as well as the institutions; the informal connections, networks, and influences, as well as the diplomacy and bureaucracy, of global sport. Taken together, this editorial and the articles that constitute the special issue seek to make a case not for the cultural significance of sport in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world – which seems to be indisputable – but for the contribution that scholarship on the topic of sport can make to our understanding of global and transnational history.

The codification of modern Western sport, and its initial geographical dispersal, coincided with the period identified either as the ‘first wave’ of globalization or the ‘“turn of the twentieth century” transnational revolution’.Footnote ¹³ Broadly from the 1850s to 1920, a series of developments and transformations in technology, communication, and transport helped to facilitate increasing rates of population movement and migration flows, as well as wider social and associational connections and interactions across different parts of the globe.Footnote ¹⁴ The period from around 1880 to 1920 was particularly important in internationalizing sport, through the flow of people, rules of play, and associated sporting ideologies and codes of conduct, as well as the establishment of practices of touring to play and the first regular transnational contests. International governing bodies were in their early stages, or had yet to appear, but discussions about rules, competitions, and control took place more often by letter, via cable, in the press, and increasingly at international meetings and congresses. All of this might be usefully understood in terms of the emergence of a new global public sphere and a globalist ethos through which ‘more people [were] participating in globalization … consciously thinking and acting on a global basis, and from more centres, than at any other time since’.Footnote ¹⁵

The trajectory of sport seems, on the surface at least, to have moved closely, and often in tandem, with wider economic, political, and cultural currents during the post-1950 cycle of globalization. The intervening interwar and war years – heavily debated among historians who emphasize economic de-globalization and a limiting and narrowing of earlier global networks and those who seek to bring out patterns of continuity and processes occurring outside the transatlantic world – were an important time in the global trajectory of sport.Footnote ¹⁶ But it was also a period when national organizations and outlooks formed, often in international contexts, and it is precisely here, in the interplay between global, national, and local positions, that historical studies of sport have most to contribute.

The articles here broadly cover this period from modern globalization to contemporary globalization.Footnote ¹⁷ While Tony Collins and Matthew Taylor focus on the earlier decades, from the mid nineteenth century to the First World War, and Jared van Duinen covers a similar period up to 1939, Shohei Sato, Paul Dietschy, Fahad Mustafa, and Mark Dyreson take a longer view, assessing the histories of judo, football, cricket, and the Olympics respectively across much of the twentieth century. As a group, the articles demonstrate that modern sport did not simply progress chronologically from local, to national, and on to international and global realms, but rather that transnational dimensions and relationships were there from the beginning and that, indeed, as in other fields, national frameworks were often the product of prior transnational processes.Footnote ¹⁸

Geographically, the articles do not attempt individually or collectively to embrace the whole world. However, in the course of their narratives, they do travel and stop off at a variety of locations. All revolve around single national, regional, or institutional hubs, or interlinked locales, yet stretch out to map transnational or global contacts and networks. Each of the articles deals with a particular case study and a specific sport, or a group of sports in the case of the football codes, the Olympics, and Anglo-Australian sports. American and Australian football, athletics, boxing, judo, cricket, soccer, and swimming feature heavily but many other examples could have been chosen. Golf, tennis, and motor racing, to take just a few examples, may have equal claims to be seen in transnational or global terms. Horse racing, gymnastics, and baseball, to pick a few more, have already been the subject of historical or socio-historical cross-national studies.Footnote ¹⁹ As with its chronological and geographical scope, the intention of this collection is not to cover the world of sport comprehensively but to offer pertinent case studies that illuminate our awareness of the relevance of sport to globalization and global history.

The articles in this special issue address a number of important themes that connect closely to prevailing issues in global history research. First, through their shared focus on the exploration of connections and interactions across national boundaries, they offer a critique of national narratives of historical development. This does not necessarily equate to a rejection of nation-centred perspectives, especially in view of the undoubted significance of the nation-state and national identities in the story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sport.Footnote ²⁰ What these articles do attempt, however, is both a reconceptualization of ‘national’ sport in terms of its global and transnational influences and a blending of what are often conceived as discrete national sporting histories.

The American case is a particularly revealing one. While there has been a demonstrable historiographical move towards global contexts and transnational perspectives in US history since the 1990s, research on sport has tended to stay locked within national parameters.Footnote ²¹ At first glance, sport might appear to be one field of American history where notions of ‘exceptionalism’ are difficult to challenge: a strand of American popular culture that was qualitatively different in form, structure, and ideology to its counterparts elsewhere in the world. Yet this neglects the various ways in which American sport was significant in world history. For instance, one can look at sport in terms of a broader American imperial mentality that stressed outward engagement rather than parochialism and isolation.Footnote ²² Albert Spalding's world tour of 1888–89 – an early attempt to globalize the ‘American game’ – was a good example of this. Spalding, a player, administrator, and sports goods promoter, was ‘an energetic booster for baseball, his business and America’ who looked upon the tour as an opportunity for expanding American cultural and economic interests abroad.Footnote ²³ In the period following the Second World War, meanwhile, it was not individual evangelists or governments but US-based multinational corporations that played the key role in ‘shaping global sport’ by influencing the way in which sport was structured and marketed elsewhere in the world.Footnote ²⁴

Dyreson's article fits into this broader conception of American sport as expanding out into world history. His analysis of the Olympic Games, from the celebrity athletes and swimmers of the 1920s and 1930s to the beach volleyball players and mountain bikers of 2012, carefully outlines the way in which American promoters, athletes, and politicians have used the event as a vehicle for globalizing a particular vision of the US as a ‘republic of consumption’. Collins, by contrast, interrogates the national framing of American sports history in a different way, by looking at the transnational origins of one of America's ‘national’ games. He shows how the rules of American football emerged not in nationalist isolation but as part of a more general cross-continental debate about how to solve the practical difficulties inherent in various rugby-derived football codes. This type of analysis complements the viewpoint of scholars such as T. N. Harper, who argues that, before 1914, universal problems were often resolved by common, and sometimes connected, solutions: ‘in different locales, a wider range of predicaments was being discussed in similar terms; in adjacent locales, similar debates were being played out in similar ways, in similar language’.Footnote ²⁵ It also echoes a general research trend that has ‘critically revisited discourses of national and cultural heritage’ and in which scholars have demonstrated how ‘supposed national traditions … were being constructed under the influence of international discourses and their supporting networks’.Footnote ²⁶

A number of the articles challenge established understandings of sports diffusion. It is difficult, of course, to deny the central role of the West, particularly Britain and the United States, in the global diffusion of many modern sports from the nineteenth century onwards. But this picture is increasingly being refined and nuanced in a number of ways. Recent work has highlighted the ‘pluri-centred context’ in which international sport developed, as well as reaffirming the role of France and Germany and, outside Europe, Japan, in the global spread of a range of sports.Footnote ²⁷ Sato takes this on board but goes further, locating his exploration of the globalization of judo within a body of work that questions simplistic unidirectional models of sports diffusion. He suggests that the diffusion of sport was not simply a one-sided flow from ‘the West to the rest’ but ‘more of a collective construct with multiple strands expanding in various directions and fusing with each other’. As such, his findings chime with other scholars of global history in Japan, who stress ‘mutual connections and relationships in both directions between Asia and the West’.Footnote ²⁸ Mustafa's analysis, meanwhile, shows how the migration of large numbers of south Asians led to the reconfiguration of global cricket, fuelling the late-twentieth-century shift in cricketing power from Britain and its former white colonies to the Indian subcontinent.

In view of the present-centred focus of the majority of existing accounts of the globalization of sport, these articles share an aim to deepen our historical understanding of globalizing processes. We can pick out four key themes that run through the collection: the importance of technological innovations; the standardization of rules and regulations; the role of institutions; and the role of individuals.

Technological developments, particularly in communications and travel, were crucial prerequisites for the emergence of the modern sporting world. The rise of transoceanic sporting interactions was dependent upon nineteenth-century advances in transportation. The steamship moved not only people, capital, and products but also information and ideas via newspapers, private letters, and human interaction faster and more effectively than had been possible before. What is more, travel itself had the potential to alter self-perceptions and perceptions of others, and to foster wider group identities: ‘in the moving space of the steamship’, Tamson Pietsch has recently suggested, ‘travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds’.Footnote ²⁹ This certainly seems to have occurred in relation to the emergence of what has been described as a ‘transnational sporting fraternity’ based on American–Japanese baseball encounters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Safer, more affordable, and more regular steamship travel facilitated a number of reciprocal exchanges and tours.Footnote ³⁰ In a similar way and at a similar time, as Taylor shows, the exchanges and nascent networks of the anglophone boxing world were fostered through and, in part at least, traced by transpacific and transatlantic shipping routes.

Travel stimulated mail communications, while major breakthroughs in cable telegraphy and later in radio technology had a profound effect on the speed of connections and on perceptions of distance. Improvements in the distances covered and the speed with which information could be carried via the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter impacted in significant ways on the popular newspaper press across the globe.Footnote ³¹ Sport was also central to accompanying changes in the form and content of journalism. Communications technology and international sport reinforced one another when major events took place. Jack Johnson's heavyweight title fight with Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, in July 1910 attracted some 300 journalists from across the United States and the world, who collectively wrote around a million words a day. Henry Wales of the Chicago Tribune later recalled that ‘no event in modern times so permeated the mind of the world, until Charles Lindbergh's flight from Long Island to Paris 17 years later’.Footnote ³² The rise of radio, the newsreel, and then television only served to deepen the roots and widen the impact of what one historian has called ‘a shared sport information system’ linking people together ‘in a transnational community of interest’.Footnote ³³

We need to be mindful that this picture of the relatively uncomplicated spread of transnational communications has been qualified by historians who have stressed that such technologies could be expensive and unreliable and their application structured so as to restrict rather than broaden access to information.Footnote ³⁴ Yet, while the articles take on board Glen O'Hara's view of the ‘deeply variegated, uneven and kaleidoscopic nature’ of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century communications, for instance, they highlight nonetheless the implications of real and perceived improvements in communication and connectivity in the transnational and global encounters that they examine.Footnote ³⁵ All of the articles show, in their own ways, how rapid connections not only encouraged dialogues between national sporting cultures but helped to create transnational spaces where debates about rules, competitions, and local, national, and global identities could take place.

Questions relating to the standardization of game forms and rules have long been central to the historiography of sport but they have tended to be examined in national or comparative contexts.Footnote ³⁶ Yet for a number of the authors here, the focus is on transnational debates about rules and standards. Collins and Sato consider how discussions over the rules of different versions of ‘football’ and of judo helped to create global networks between administrators, players, and collective authorities in different countries and regions; for Taylor, it was the quest for universal standards in competition that drove efforts to extend and formalize existing transnational boxing networks in the decade before the First World War. In this case, as in others, standardized rules were resisted by many and, when they did develop, it was not always in neat stages from the local, to the national, and then on to the international.

Standardization was often closely linked with the role of institutions, another theme that threads through the articles. International governing bodies have been important forces in the globalizing of sport but they have varied considerably in their organization and power structures and in their relationships to subsidiary national and continental groupings. In football, international combination predated the formation of national bodies in a number of European territories, and certain national member associations, such as those of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, enjoyed a privileged representational status and rule-making powers.Footnote ³⁷ Tensions between the overlapping transnational, continental, and national interests of FIFA's constituent parts have been evident throughout its history, as Dietschy indicates. However, what is most evident in this story is that, in common with other international federations such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Cricket Council (ICC), and the International Judo Federation (IJF), it was through FIFA that the central role of the nation-state in the territorial organization of the sport was established and upheld.

The contributors also tease out the role of individuals in the making of global sport. Considerable scholarly attention has been paid of late to the biographical study of transnational careers and lives.Footnote ³⁸ Plotting the courses of mobile and transnational lives, it has been claimed, offers the opportunity to integrate personal and intimate experiences with the larger story of global circulation and interconnections.Footnote ³⁹ One of the most important protagonists of this methodology, Angela Woollacott, has documented the lives of a number of Australian performers, including some sportswomen, who travelled widely and became global celebrities. The swimmer, diver, and vaudeville and silent-film star Annette Kellerman, for example, left Australia for London in 1905 and went on to perform in Europe, the United States, and Australasia into the 1920s. Her career exemplified both the triangular connections of the transnational entertainment industry linking Australia, Britain, and the United States and also the ‘symbiotic relationship between transnational culture and national identities’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Some of the lives contained in the articles here clearly fit with these patterns, although the administrators are the global stars of the narratives as often as the athletes. Scores of competitive Australian cricketers and swimmers travelled back and forth between Australia and Britain from the 1880s to the First World War. Jigoro Kano, the originator of judo and one of its chief proselytizers, toured the world twelve times between 1889 and 1938 to promote the sport. FIFA's seventh president, the Brazilian João Havelange, was said to have visited 192 countries on at least three occasions, spending some 20,000 hours on a plane, during a twenty-five-year post that ended in 1999.Footnote ⁴¹ But by no means all these were careers of ceaseless mobility and border-crossing that could be said to have transcended the nation. Despite the overarching transnational context in which he operated, for example, the American football coach and administrator Walter Camp was very much a national sporting figure. The story of his contribution to the development of a supposedly distinctly American sporting pastime was largely constructed through his own writing. The textual representations of Camp's life, through which both contemporaries and historians came to know him, served in some respects to artificially nationalize and restrict a career that was actually played out in response to a wider set of influences, many of them emanating from other parts of the English-speaking world. In this sense, both Camp and the American game that he helped to establish were ‘produced’ transnationally.Footnote ⁴²

Across the contributions, the authors switch between global and transnational perspectives to make sense of the forces and interactions that they describe. As many scholars have acknowledged, much of the attraction of the term ‘transnational’ lies in its fluidity and openness.Footnote ⁴³ Its connotations are ambiguous and packed full of ‘contradictory impulses’.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the very least, however, we might accept that transnational approaches to history ‘look at processes and actors that move across territorial boundaries of diverse nation-states’ and see these flows and movements as themselves ‘constructive of change, as causally significant, and thus as producing history’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The nation is not jettisoned in transnational history, of course, and neither is it here. Indeed, nationally defined sports, organizations, rules, and actors are often centre-stage in the studies that follow. Yet what is clear from these accounts is that sport was neither only nor primarily concerned with the nation. International competition and bodies rose alongside, and offered legitimacy to, national teams, styles, and ideologies. The quest for uniformity, in the rules, regulations, control, and governance of sport developed together, and often in tension, with claims to protect diversity and difference. The world mattered, although how the ‘world’ was defined depended on your place within it, as the comparison of American baseball's ‘national’ World Series and soccer's ‘global’, but regionally and unevenly structured, World Cup demonstrates. By focusing on the interconnections and networks that worked across, but also within and between, the nation, this collection seeks to offer new insights into national as well as transnational and global sport, and the relations between them.

Inevitably, much more work needs to be done. These articles only touch upon the various international, transnational, and global connections, exchanges, and rivalries that have shaped sport, and the world beyond, since the mid nineteenth century. Some themes that are increasingly recognized as essential to our understanding of global and transnational history – such as ethnicity, race, and gender – make only brief appearances in these articles. Yet what the contributors here show is that, as an important strand of global popular culture, sport mattered to many people in the past just as now, and that as a global phenomenon its historical significance has been unjustly marginalized.