Sport history sans frontières? New book applies a transnational perspective

Hans Bolling
PhD in History, Independent scholar

In Stockholm’s City Archive you can find a letter, dated February 14, 1867, from Jackson Haines to the director of the Royal Theatre, and marshal of the court, Erik Edholm, in which the figure skating pioneer writes: “I have the honour to acknowledge receipt of your distinguished favor this morning notifying me of his Royal Majesty the King’s pleasure to bestow upon me Gold Medal with crown of the 8^th size.” Haines had been awarded the medal Litteris et Artibus by King Karl XV, which was awarded for outstanding contributions, primarily in music, stage production and literature.

I thought about Jackson Haines when reading Matthew Taylor’s book World of Sport: Transnational and Connected Histories. Haines has gone down in history as the great pioneer of modern figure skating. He left North America during the Civil War and undertook several tours of Europe, and his elegant skating set a fashion for future generation of figure skaters and became known as the International Style in contrast to the more rigid and stiff English Style. He attracted immense attention across the continent. When he died from pneumonia in 1875, Swedish newspapers published articles, all of which had a similar paragraph:

“Jackson Haines died on Midsummer Eve in the Finnish town of Kokkola [Gammel-Karleby] with a wish on his lips, to be buried in Stockholm. Born and raised in North America, knowing and known in most of the countries of Europe, celebrated everywhere, he loved Sweden most of all countries and Stockholm most of all cities. There he wished to live, and to die.”

Jackson Haines is, however, buried at an unknown site in Kokkola. The Swedish public could nevertheless remember their figure skating hero over a glass of Swedish punch – Jackson Haines Skridsko Pounsch.

In World of Sport Matthew Taylor examines the development of modern sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in the light of transnational approaches to history, that is, exploring the interconnection between people, places, ideas and actions in the emergence of modern sport and its associated cultures. By doing that, Taylor wants to challenge and augment nation-based histories and thus “work towards a framework for engagement between sports history and transnational, connected and global histories”. The advantage of the transnational approach over global and international perspectives is said to be that “it does not suggest a universalistic scope”.

Being from a peripheral country, and speaking a langue understood by few, which nonetheless has had some successes in international sports, an awareness of the transnational links of sport has always been an axiom in most of the sports history I have been taught.

Taylor has divided his book into two chronological parts, the first of which is the major one, and an introduction. In the introduction the transnational perspective is presented and relevant research, general as well as in sports history, is reviewed. Taylor argues for his choice of perspective but also directs some criticism toward the sports history community for being a bit territorial, in more ways than one, and also for not trying hard enough to make an impact in the wider scientific community. The criticism is not without value, but after finishing World of Sport I am not convinced that the transnational perspective increases our understanding and knowledge of sport in a way that makes the perspective superior to the approaches that sports historians have traditionally utilized. What is really new? Being from a peripheral country, and speaking a langue understood by few, which nonetheless has had some successes in international sports, an awareness of the transnational links of sport has always been an axiom in most of the sports history I have been taught.

One problem with the approach is what Taylor calls “the impact on place-based expertise”, i.e., that the primacy and particularity of place can be marginalised if the researcher does not spend time in archives in place or at least with the national and local literature. That is valid criticism, but not fateful. As I understand Christopher Hill from Michael Braddick’s biography, he was a master of early modern print sources at the expense of an engagement with manuscript archives, but that did not stop him from writing The World Turned Upside Down. The ultimate transnational historian might not exist; to really excel in writing transnational sports history a requirement seems to be that you actually are a polyglot and have unlimited time to read and visit archives.

The first empirical part of World of Sport covers the history of sport from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War and is divided into four thematic chapters, covering migration, touring, communication, and competition. Taylor uses what he calls “a case study approach to demonstrate the variety of ways in which historians have either written about sport from a transnational perspective or used sport to exemplify or increase our understanding of the relationship between the local, national and transnational”. I am not sure his use of the term case study would have been appreciated around the seminar tables I sat at when I was a student. The studies are far too general for that and lacks in depth, however that does not stop me from finding them very interesting. It is a joy to read, and the width in knowledge that Taylor shows is impressive.

The first chapter deals with the impact of the mobility of people on the movement of sporting practices and ideas, the way in which sport was spread. Examples are taken from the development of football codes in different parts of the world. The introduction of association football in Sweden is mentioned in passing, but the much more interesting, and for Taylors purpose fitting, subject of Svensk fotboll (Swedish football), a football code created in 1885 by leading clubs in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Visby, is ignored. Then attention is paid to the way in which judo, surfing and swimming, bodily cultures originating outside the West, emerged as competitive sports. Lastly the role played by the two world wars in the diffusion of sport by bringing people from different parts of the world together is discussed.

In the second chapter the spotlight is on the significance of touring and other forms of sporting mobility in the emergence of a transnational sporting culture. Taylor discusses patterns of tours of teams playing baseball, football and hockey (a clarification for Scandinavian readers: the touring hockey players were women playing field hockey, not men playing ice hockey) and boxers.

The third chapter, about communication, focuses on the communication systems through which sporting news was circulated. As the chapter deals with phenomena that do not require physical mobility per se, it gives the reader a glimpse of a transnational world that could be imagined by those who did not travel. Taylor looks at the newspaper press, radio broadcasts, photographs and sporting films.

In the chapter about competition, the focus is on sporting events, the institutions that planned them, and the cities in which they took place, as a vehicle for cross-cultural contact, communication and exchange. Taylor pays attention to hubs and contacts zones, places as well as particular institutions, matches and tournaments. The case studies are taken from, inter alia, the men’s football World Cup, the Olympic Game and the Women’s World Games.

In the second part, which covers the decades after the Second World War, Taylor investigates the development of sport across and between nations taking into account the Cold War, decolonisation and mass migration. It consists of three sections. The first section analyses international competition not only as a place for tension and division but also as a meeting point between different actors and a forum for mutual exchange and goodwill. Examples are taken from both global mega events such as the Olympics and regional competitions such as the Pan-American Games. The second section explores the relationship between individuals and non-governmental organisations, with focus on student and youth exchange and town twinning arrangements. Finally the migration patterns in society and sport is studied: did the population exchange represent a new age of transnational sport?

The book concludes with Taylor drawing together key arguments and themes. He emphasizes the importance of sport and sporting culture in understanding the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A valued point when one wants to lift the study of sport history to its rightful place among other sub disciplines in the field of academic studies of history.

Finally, there is one thing that puzzles me. The image on the cover of the book is said to be a postage stamp printed in Switzerland for the 1954 men’s football World Cup showing a soccer ball and world map, it also matches the picture in the letter missive I received with the book and the pictures of the book I found on the internet. The book I read, however, had a nineteenth century Japanese print showing Japanese court ladies wearing western dresses on its cover, a sure sign of transnational influences but the connection to sport is not clear. The old saying not to judge a book by its cover comes true here.[1]

World of Sport is sports history at its best, where sport’s chequered past is brought to life and we come closer to understand the most important of all the unessential but wonderful things humans dedicate their time to. Two decades have passed since I last reviewed a book by Matthew Taylor, The Leaguers: The Making of Professional Football in England, 1900–1939 on idrottsforum.org, but his scholarship still impresses me.

Copyright © Hans Bolling 2025

[1] Routledge, the publisher of Taylor’s book, informs us that there was an issue with the cover of the book when it was initially published. While the cover image was correct in their systems, on their website etc. from before publication, somehow when the book went to press the cover image was incorrect. This was caught early and all warehouse copies with the wrong cover were pulped, but unfortunately a couple of early copies were sent out before the error was discovered, one of which was obviously the one received by idrottsforum.org and dispatched to reviewer Hans Bolling. The correct cover is the one at the top of this page, and the dis-cover is the one posted next to this paragraph.