New Books In World Affairs

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports. Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose from the ball games of Mayan Central America or the chaotic scrums of medieval European villages. Historians have specified these traits and plumbed their origins, typically finding the hearth in England of the 18th and 19th centuries. What was it about England that gave rise to modern sport? Was it the emerging political liberty and notions of rights? The freedom of men to join clubs and associations, or the expansion of the popular press? Was it the decline of feudalism after the revolutionary events of the 1600s, or even the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who posited that all of life is competition? Tony Collins points to all of these factors as significant for the birth of modern sport in England. But at the root of all this, the fundamental driver of sport’s d