Sport in Modern European History: Trajectories, Constellations, Conjunctures¹

Abstract

This essay reviews sport-related articles that have previously appeared in the JHS, alongside a range of other historical works, and in so doing recognizes the importance of persisting themes in the socio-cultural, historical analysis of sport. Such themes have appeared in wide-ranging socio-historical and figurational work, and also underpin the contributions to this special issue: they include the dynamics of cultural importation, diffusion and appropriation; and the cultural significance of sport in wider status and power relations. Emphasizing the compatibility of the historical and the sociological imaginations, and confirming recent positions on the integration of the cultural and the social in historical work, the article goes on to contextualize the place of sport in Europe in the period from the later decades of the nineteenth century into the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Referencing classic debates on historical method and periodization -particularly Braudel's discussions of event, conjuncture, and longue durée -the article identifies core conjunctural features of European sport in the period: internationalism/early globalization; increasing forms of mediatization; emergent individualism; and commercialized consumption and celebrity.

Cultural Transfer, Circulation, and Diffusion between Britain and Europe from the 1770s to the 1870s: The Case of Thoroughbred Horse-Racing and Breeding

“…[them]according to their own cultural needs, aspirations and ideologies'. 10 This essay takes as its focus just one British sport, thoroughbred horseracing and its multiple forms of cultural transfer across Europe, over the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, ending at a point when top European-bred horses could compete successfully with the best British thoroughbred. Horse racing had an important symbolic role in the accelerating culture of modernity and the complex inter-cultural, political and economic currents which had major impacts on the growth, development and diffusion of European sports.…”