Cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the English, it has famously been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation. Drawing on an unparalleled range of original archival sources, Cricket Country is the story of the first All India cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland. It is also the extraordinary tale of how the idea of India took shape on the cricket field in the high noon of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of colonial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before an Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain. This historic tour, which took place against the backdrop of revolutionary politics in the Edwardian era, featured an improbable cast of characters. The teams young captain was the newly enthroned ruler of a powerful Sikh state. The other cricketers were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, for the day, two of the players were Dalits. Over the course of the blazing Coronation summer of 1911, these Indians participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes the way in which sport and above all cricket helped fashion the imagined communities of both empire and nation.

The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch.

Few other team sports can equal the global reach of cricket. Rich in history and tradition, it is both quintessentially English and expansively international, a game that has evolved and changed dramatically in recent times. Demonstrating how the history of cricket and its international popularity is entwined with British imperial expansion, this book examines the social and political impact of the game in a variety of cultural sites: the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. An international team of contributors explores the enduring influence of cricket on English identity, examines why cricket has seized the imagination of so many literary figures and provides profiles of iconic players including Bradman, Lara and Tendulkar. Presenting a global panoramic view of cricket's complicated development, its unique adaptability and its political and sporting controversies, the book provides a rich insight into a unique sporting and cultural heritage.

Cricket has changed dramatically in recent years and now can claim to be a truly global game, thanks in large part to new media technologies which bring a global audience for World Cups and other major competitions. However, the globalization of cricket has not followed a pattern familiar in other sports: concentrations of wealth, media, and marketing leading to the domination of Western countries over the rest, and this fact alone makes it interesting for scholars of the globalization of sport. Cricket has followed a very different global path; the non-Western countries (former British colonies) have begun to dominate and have taken control of the economics and politics of the game. In short, cricket has been “Indianized”. The globalization of cricket has received a massive boost from the popularity of the newest form of the game (Twenty20) which is helping promote cricket as a mass TV sport. The rise of Twenty20, particularly the Indian Premier League (IPL), is transforming the way cricket is organized, played, and watched all over the world. This development both reinforces the globalization of cricket and also underlines that the “movers and shakers” within cricket are no longer the traditional elites in metropolitan centres but the businessmen of India and the media entrepreneurs world-wide who seek to shape new audiences for the game and create new marketing opportunities on a global scale.

In his important contribution to the growing field of sports literature, Anthony Bateman traces the relationship between literary representations of cricket and Anglo-British national identity from 1850 to the mid 1980s. Examining newspaper accounts, instructional books, fiction, poetry, and the work of editors, anthologists, and historians, Bateman elaborates the ways in which a long tradition of literary discourse produced cricket's cultural status and meaning. His critique of writing about cricket leads to the rediscovery of little-known texts and the reinterpretation of well-known works by authors as diverse as Neville Cardus, James Joyce, the Great War poets, and C.L.R. James. Beginning with mid-eighteenth century accounts of cricket that provide essential background, Bateman examines the literary evolution of cricket writing against the backdrop of key historical moments such as the Great War, the 1926 General Strike, and the rise of Communism. Several case studies show that cricket simultaneously asserted English ideals and created anxiety about imperialism, while cricket's distinctively colonial aesthetic is highlighted through Bateman's examination of the discourse surrounding colonial cricket tours and cricketers like Prince Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji of India and Sir Learie Constantine of Trinidad. Featuring an extensive bibliography, Bateman's book shows that, while the discourse surrounding cricket was key to its status as a symbol of nation and empire, the embodied practice of the sport served to destabilise its established cultural meaning in the colonial and postcolonial contexts.

A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. There was a time when major English writers – P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alec Waugh – took time off to write about cricket, whereas the cricket book market today is dominated by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The Picador Book of Cricket celebrates the best writing on the game and includes many pieces that have been out of print, or difficult to get hold of, for years. Including Neville Cardus, C. L. R. James, John Arlott, V. S. Naipaul, and C. B. Fry, this anthology is a must for any cricket follower or anyone interested in sports writing elevated to high art.