Bookshelf
| can't find it |

| browse books |
books
 

| book details |

Windrush Cricket: Imperial Culture, Caribbean Migration, and the Remaking of Postwar England

By (author) Michael Collins

| on special |

normal price: R 1 412.95

Price: R 1 270.95


| book description |

How did the 'quintessentially English' game of cricket come to be so important across Britain's Caribbean empire? As empire declined and gave way to complex patterns of migration, what part did cricket play in the life of the Windrush generation in post-war Britain? Following the work of the great Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, much has been written about the profound importance of cricket for the development of social and cultural life within the Anglophone Caribbean. And yet, from at least the 1930s, Black West Indian cricketers were celebrated far beyond the Caribbean, in England and across empire. Cricket was in fact a major factor shaping imperial ideas about Black people--how they looked and behaved, what their imagined characteristics and traits were--placing the West Indies, as the Caribbean islands were then known, within a racialised, hierarchical structure of cricket-loving peoples, alongside the colonies of white settlement: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. During World War II, Black West Indians played prominent roles in the surprisingly large amount of cricket played in England, part of a wider propaganda effort to promote the idea of a multiracial empire, united in common cause against fascism. For post-Windrush arrivals after 1948, cricket was not just a peripheral pastime or a recreational footnote. Cricket was a cornerstone of Black West Indian social and cultural life and self-empowerment in England, integral to the earliest creation of social and community groups and the development of support networks. Watching the West Indies international cricket team win on the field of play was just one part of the Windrush story. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the growth of an extensive network of Windrush cricket teams and clubs, and, by the 1970s, the evolution of Caribbean cricket leagues and competitions, created a subtle and multifaceted sense of being a West Indian in England. In due course, the children of Windrush migrants would seek to play cricket for England, challenging the very notion of what it means to be English. Interweaving extensive archival and oral history research into an engaging, often surprising narrative about empire and postwar Britain, Windrush Cricket challenges a range of orthodoxies, arguing that cricket constituted a foundational, yet almost entirely ignored aspect of the way in which Windrush migrants settled and made new lives in postwar England.

| product details |



Normally shipped | Forthcoming
Publisher | Oxford University Press
Published date | 11 Sep 2025
Language |
Format | Hardback
Pages | 240
Dimensions | 234 x 156 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 978-0-1988-7570-3
Readership Age |
BISAC | history / europe / great britain
Expected |

| other options |



Normally shipped | Forthcoming. We are not accepting backorders for this item yet
Readership Age |
Normal Price | R 1 781.95
Price | R 1 603.95 | on special |



| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

Survive the AI Apocalypse: A guide for solutionists

Bronwyn Williams
Paperback / softback
232 pages
was: R 340.95
now: R 306.95
Forthcoming

Look around you is anything real or normal any more? News, images and videos created by AI are everywhere.

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

William Kelleher Storey
Paperback / softback
528 pages
was: R 425.95
now: R 382.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodes’s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting, white-dominated colonial society.

The Memory Collectors: A Novel

Dete Meserve
Paperback / softback
320 pages


Enquiries only


The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order