Welsh Journals

Despite its shortcomings, the book provides solid ground for arguing that any study of the industrialization process and industrial change within a specific region must, of necessity, consider factors of an economic, social and political character, which are both internal and external to it. One final comment on the normally excellent production associated with Cambridge University Press: was it a rapid and (hopefully) short-lived phase of de- industrialisation in the Cambridge region (due to the drying up of outside capital?) which explains why pages 244 and 245 of this reviewer's copy were blank? T. BOYNS Cardiff PLEASURE, PROFIT AND PROSELYTISM: BRITISH CULTURE AND SPORT AT HOME AND AROAD, 1700-1914. Edited by J. A. Mangan. Frank Cass, London, 1988. Pp. xiv, 284. £ 22.50 hardback; £ 11.50 paperback. 'Pleasure, Profit and Proselytism is concerned essentially with sport as a cultural phenomenon in Britain and its imperial territories, lost and retained, from the period of the Industrial Revolution to the period of the Great War, (p. 1), and seeks to give support to the contention of Eric Hobsbawm that sport was one of the most important new social practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, central to the process by which traditions were invented. This is a large claim and the rather loosely related essays do not add up their evidence in a way which substantiates it. All address issues of sport and its social role in Britain and its Empire (extended to cover Philadelphia). They lack the excuse of a conference or a retirement and neither are they welded together by the editor's perfunctory introduction, though there are some interesting things between the covers. There are fourteen contributors, six of whom are involved in physical education in some way, while another has played first class cricket. Eighteenth-century specialists who buy it should ask for a refund, as despite the nominal terminal dates there is no concern for the period before 1790. The extent to which the Empire was integrated by cultural hegemony, of which sport was an important ingredient, is a popular theme in recent historiography. The essays in the second part of this book contribute some further evidence of this. Kathleen Moore, for instance, links a project to create a Pan-Britannic Festival in the 1890s with perceptions of national and imperial decline. Despite press coverage it collapsed for lack of practical work being undertaken. The story is clearly told but it is hard to see its wider significance, apart from a footnote to the Empire Games which emerged in 1930. Many of the essays are similar-of specialist interest, Perhaps, but they will not detain the reader in search of a more general understanding of the British Empire for long. Other contibutions are sometimes preliminary and not fully worked out. The essay that delivers most in this section is Andre Odenaal's look at black cricket in Victorian South Africa, a subject lost under the weight of subsequent discrimination and the development of working class sports like soccer