scholarly journals Confirming Tradition: Confirming Change – A Social History of the Cricket Tours to New Zealand in the 1930s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Owen Mann

<p><b>This study examines the eight tours to New Zealand by visiting cricketing teams between 1930 and 1939. There were four tours made by the Marylebone Cricket Club along with inaugural visits by the West Indies, South Africa, an England Women's XI, and lastly the Julien Cahn XI. These tours were major events for contemporaries, attracting large crowds and much attention in the press. They are a focus for an examination of New Zealand’s relations with other parts of the world, specifically other parts of the Empire. The tours were major sporting events, but also prompted wider popular and public discussion of nationhood, race, gender and the role of sport in society and the Empire.</b></p> <p>For the New Zealand public in the 1930s, cricket was a game that connected them with their British and imperial heritage during a period of uncertainty. For the cricket community of New Zealand the tours were massive undertakings due to the substantial financial commitment required and poor results, but the tours continued because of the strong associations and core beliefs that cricket nurtured and because of a love of the game. Though these tours contained few moments of on-field achievement for the hosts they say much about how New Zealanders of that decade viewed themselves and others.</p> <p>Drawing primarily on the dense contemporary press coverage 'Confirming Tradition, Confirming Change' examines cricket's capacity to operate as more than a game - it acts as a conduit for understanding the broader social attitudes and beliefs of the time. Each of the tours contains an internal narrative concerning entrenched traditions and bonds and their interplay with newer realities and considerations. Cricket was largely administered by bodies that emphasised the traditions and conservative structures of the game, but the teams themselves represented and engaged with the changing expectations and realities of sport in this decade. Cricket was changing from within, exemplified by the expansion of test cricket but also influenced by external elements such as the growth of radio commentary and cinema. This study examines the eight tours in three chronologically bracketed chapters focusing on issues of race in the tours by the MCC of 1929-30, the West Indies in 1930-31 and South Africa in 1931-32; the issue of gender and identity in the tours by the MCC of 1932-33 and the England Women of 1934-35; and issues of professionalism/commercialism and differences in player and public expectations in the tours by the MCC in 1935-36, 1936-37 and the Julien Cahn XI in 1938-39. Throughout the eight tours there were tensions between tradition and change, sometimes exhibited between New Zealand crowds and visiting teams, sometimes between administrators and players. The tours may have reflected the weakness of New Zealand cricket, but the local players' and spectators' commitment to Empire is apparent through the continued perseverance at a sport that at the time represented imperial loyalty and global British communality.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Owen Mann

<p><b>This study examines the eight tours to New Zealand by visiting cricketing teams between 1930 and 1939. There were four tours made by the Marylebone Cricket Club along with inaugural visits by the West Indies, South Africa, an England Women's XI, and lastly the Julien Cahn XI. These tours were major events for contemporaries, attracting large crowds and much attention in the press. They are a focus for an examination of New Zealand’s relations with other parts of the world, specifically other parts of the Empire. The tours were major sporting events, but also prompted wider popular and public discussion of nationhood, race, gender and the role of sport in society and the Empire.</b></p> <p>For the New Zealand public in the 1930s, cricket was a game that connected them with their British and imperial heritage during a period of uncertainty. For the cricket community of New Zealand the tours were massive undertakings due to the substantial financial commitment required and poor results, but the tours continued because of the strong associations and core beliefs that cricket nurtured and because of a love of the game. Though these tours contained few moments of on-field achievement for the hosts they say much about how New Zealanders of that decade viewed themselves and others.</p> <p>Drawing primarily on the dense contemporary press coverage 'Confirming Tradition, Confirming Change' examines cricket's capacity to operate as more than a game - it acts as a conduit for understanding the broader social attitudes and beliefs of the time. Each of the tours contains an internal narrative concerning entrenched traditions and bonds and their interplay with newer realities and considerations. Cricket was largely administered by bodies that emphasised the traditions and conservative structures of the game, but the teams themselves represented and engaged with the changing expectations and realities of sport in this decade. Cricket was changing from within, exemplified by the expansion of test cricket but also influenced by external elements such as the growth of radio commentary and cinema. This study examines the eight tours in three chronologically bracketed chapters focusing on issues of race in the tours by the MCC of 1929-30, the West Indies in 1930-31 and South Africa in 1931-32; the issue of gender and identity in the tours by the MCC of 1932-33 and the England Women of 1934-35; and issues of professionalism/commercialism and differences in player and public expectations in the tours by the MCC in 1935-36, 1936-37 and the Julien Cahn XI in 1938-39. Throughout the eight tours there were tensions between tradition and change, sometimes exhibited between New Zealand crowds and visiting teams, sometimes between administrators and players. The tours may have reflected the weakness of New Zealand cricket, but the local players' and spectators' commitment to Empire is apparent through the continued perseverance at a sport that at the time represented imperial loyalty and global British communality.</p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Barber

AbstractThis article recreates the lives of two settlers in Antigua between the years 1690 and 1740. As such, it is a key addition to the paltry number of studies of the island of Antigua and the other Leeward Islands of the West Indies. It takes as its base point the study of the Antigua settler elite identified by Richard Sheridan in his article, now forty years old, which constructed the institutional systems of landholding, taxation, customs and the Slave Trade which produced so-called Plantation Society. In the years preceding this, however, life for everyone concerned in the West Indies was uncertain and insecure. is was as much the case for those at the top of the socio-political ladder, such as island governors and Crown viceroys, as for relatively modest settlers, such as the subjects of this essay, Lawrence and Sarah Crabb. For all of those who were incorporated into the 18thcentury Plantocracy, many more were sacrificed in the struggles of early capitalism, buoyed up not by the level of 'credit' that they were accorded, but by the levels of debt they carried. The construction of a social history of modest settlers is made possible through the survival of documents which were kept by the Crabb's agent, George Moore, and which he would subsequently use in a Chancery case against his late friend's widow. These manuscripts have not been used before, except for occasional references to the legal precedents established by the case, Moore v. Meynell, and, given the paucity and patchiness of manuscript survivals for the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, show what can be reconstructed from otherwise overlooked sources. The result is a study of the measurement of a person's worth, and the increasing elision of God and Mammon in gauging credit, value and trust. In the case of the Crabbs, particularly because Lawrence was himself a man of little initial wealth who clawed his way up through his own ingenuity and his wife's family's West Indian estates, we are able to demonstrate how the language of credit and worthiness applied not only to men of business and politics but also to women.


Kultura ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 346-372
Author(s):  
Slobodan Penezić

Nowadays, sports and sports competitions are indisputably superior forms of popular entertainment and also sort of activities that are a part of everyday life for almost all of us, whether we are observers or direct participants in some of them. For the same reason, they are also some of the most profitable industries that bring huge profits and popularity to many of its actors. For all those reasons, the social context of the present role of the sport is certainly an important topic for analysis, as well as the history of changes that have resulted in the position and influence that sports hold in the modern society, and vice versa. Therefore, this text has an ambition to highlight the broader horizon of events that have led to a place that sports occupy today. On the other hand, it also sheds some light on the complicity and interactivity that existed from the beginning, along the line, between sport and the society, a culmination of which is visible in current spectacular outlines of sporting events. In this way, it points to one of the primary aspects of all sports events, but also to those secondary visible elements that today are often in the primary focus of all participants, due to the money and the attention that are following sports and sport athletes.


Author(s):  
Shmuel Feiner ◽  
David Sorkin

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-112
Author(s):  
Pierre Legendre

"Der Beitrag reevaluiert die «dogmatische Funktion», eine soziale Funktion, die mit biologischer und kultureller Reproduktion und folglich der Reproduktion des industriellen Systems zusammenhängt. Indem sie sich auf der Grenze zwischen Anthropologie und Rechtsgeschichte des Westens situiert, nimmt die Studie die psychoanalytische Frage nach der Rolle des Rechts im Verhalten des modernen Menschen erneut in den Blick. </br></br>This article reappraises the dogmatic function, a social function related to biological and cultural reproduction and consequently to the reproduction of the industrial system itself. On the borderline of anthropology and of the history of law – applied to the West – this study takes a new look at the question raised by psychoanalysis concerning the role of law in modern human behaviour. "


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document