Speaker: Michael Collins (UCL). Book your participation here: https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/caribbean-studies-seminar-4
What can be said about the changing role and meaning of cricket as expressive of specifically West Indian identities in the twentieth century, including for the immigrants who settled in England after World War II? How has our understanding of cricket and its relation to identity been shaped by the wider historiography of empire, anti-colonial nationalism and the post-colonial diaspora as well as the outsized influence of the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James? How should we write the history of the “Windrush Generation”? And in what sense can Caribbean cricket be said to have “remade” postwar England? This talk, discussing aspects of Dr Collins’ new book Windrush Cricket (Oxford University Press 2025) requires no knowledge of the game itself, but will seek to persuade listeners of cricket’s cultural and ideological importance in our understanding of Caribbean and British history, race and Englishness, postwar migration and contemporary national identity.
Dr Michael Collins (DPhil, FRHistS) has been Associate Professor of History at UCL since 2016. He previously taught at the University of Oxford, where he was also awarded his doctorate in History (2009). Prior to Oxford, Dr Collins studied the history of political thought at Cambridge and political science at the LSE. Dr Collins’ most recent book – Windrush Cricket: Imperial Culture, Caribbean Migration, and the Remaking of Postwar England – was published by Oxford University Press in September 2025. This marks the culmination of a five-year project looking at the historical and contemporary meanings of cricket for Caribbean migrants to Britain. He is currently working on two, interconnected intellectual and cultural history projects: one is a study of the ethics of dialogue and disagreement in colonial India, as manifested in the Tagore-Gandhi debates from 1920-1930; the other is a global history of multiculturalism from the late imperial 1950s to the post-colonial present.
All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Zoom at 16:30 GMT (UK time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link: https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/caribbean-studies-seminar-4
