Playing on the border: sport, borderlands and the North Atlantic, 1850–1950

Abstract

In this paper, we advance a borderlands perspective to delineate and distinguish the patterns of sporting development across the North Atlantic, with a particular focus on the transmission of lacrosse and basketball from North America to the British Isles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The borderlands perspective and the understanding of the Atlantic as an oceanic borderland allow for a reconsideration of traditional models of diffusion–modernization, which focus on the export of sporting cultures from the UK to the wider world. The borderlands model, with its consideration of the multidirectional character of cultural transference, enables a reorientation of analysis, from the metropolitan to the peripheral, from traditional framed ‘national sports’ to those that are otherwise ignored in non-native contexts by diffusion modelling, from top to down models that service the national narrative to bottom-up understandings that shed light on the activities of ordinary sportsmen and women and the communities that supported them.