This article posits that team sports can provide fresh insights into the place of leisure pursuits in the lives, networks and outlooks of historical literary figures. The social and literary role of the Authors Eleven, a cricket side of London-based writers active between 1899 and 1912, is explored through three case studies. George Ives was a pioneering campaigner for gay rights, who used cricket to bolster his homosexual identity. E. W. Hornung, creator of the famous cricketer-thief Raffles, saw cricket as the ideal training – and analogy – for imperialism. And P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, first made his name writing cricket-filled magazine pieces. All three writers saw their involvement in cricket, particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status. The Authors Eleven thus presents a potent example of embodied sociability, whereby the specific nature of what these individuals were doing together (in this case, playing cricket) has a bearing on their friendships and their intellectual outlooks. As ways of understanding the lives and cultural significance of historical figures, shared physical activity and embodied sociability need to be accorded much more importance than they have been hitherto.

Based on a reading of Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland, this article discusses the relationship between cricket and finance capitalism from the perspective of time and temporality. Despite its function as a global commodity, cricket inserts a flow of postcolonial time into the temporal streams of transnational market culture, neoliberalism, and the increasing financialization of the world. Set in the aftermath of 9/11 and before the financial crisis of 2008, Netherland juxtaposes the deviant temporal power of cricket with the time structures of finance capitalism to illustrate how the conduct of Wall Street before the crisis can be understood as a colonial appropriation. In O'Neill's novel, this conflict is embodied in the precarious friendship of a cosmopolitan Dutch financial analyst and a Trinidadian version of Jay Gatsby.

The paper provides basic information on the operation of Australian player associations. In doing so it draws on the experience of player associations in English soccer and American baseball. England’s Professional Footballers’ Association acted as a beacon to various attempts by Australian soccer players to form associations. Its legal victory in Eastham, in 1963, where it challenged the retain and transfer system, has had a resonance in Australia with the 1971 decision of the High Court in Tutty which struck down the New South Wales Rugby League’s retain and transfer system. This and decisions by lower courts in other states aided Australian player associations in their dealings with their respective leagues. Information is provided on various failed beginnings prior to World War I, and subsequent successful attempts to establish player associations in Australia, the formation of confederations both domestic and international, details of the respective membership of associations, the average income of members and a measure of their ability to provide services for members.

This article argues for the importance of an exploration of sporting interactions in the British world. In addition, it presents the case for the adaptation of borderlands theory to the British world framework. Such study of British world borderlands is capable of more accurately capturing the spatial and regional variety of this British world and, in particular, the nascent national identities of dominions such as Australia. Sport is a particularly apt vehicle for the examination of such issues in an Australian context, since playing to the ‘imaginary grandstand’ of international spectators has always occupied a central role in the construction of an Australian national identity. This article uses three brief case studies – cricket, swimming, and Australian Rules football – to explore these theoretical claims.

This article seeks to reposition sport as a subject of analysis in ‘global historical’ processes. It examines the diffusion of cricket in the British empire, its appropriation by the colonies, and the subsequent commercialization of the sport. It asks the question: how did an elite English sport come to be one controlled by a former colony – India? With this as the substantive question, it seeks to develop theoretical insights about the nature of global processes and cultural transfers in the twentieth century. By way of conclusion, it asserts that, as a result of these global processes, there was a tangible shift in the ‘cultural economy’ of sports from the developed nations of the West to the developing nations.