Malcolm's Reviews > Sports in South America: A History

**Winner of the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History**
If we read global sports history with a slightly sceptical eye it looks something like this: before Britain, there was no sport but in the 19th century the smart Brits invented a whole bunch of sports that they exported around the world to everywhere except America where those headstrong ex-colonials tweaked the glorious British games and called them their own inventions. In those other places where the British sports took hold there was either no existing sport culture (most people’s view) or it was so weak it was easily replaced. There’s a few out of the way places, like Uzbekistan, where the glorious Brits didn’t get to, so they have been able to hang on to their weird pastimes – but they’re not real sports…. While I’ll admit this is overstating it, there’s also more than a grain of truth to the idea that the British exported football (in its several forms), cricket, polo (passing over that they nicked it from South and Central Asia), and a bunch of other activities by sending out the military, school teachers, missionaries, and administrators.

Matthew Brown’s fabulous history of sport in South America until about 1930 debunks this fantasy convincingly. He does so first by showing that there was a rich and complex sporting culture well before the British cultural forces arrived. Not only was there an impressive set of Indigenous sporting activities, but the colonists – mainly Spanish and Portuguese descent – had sophisticated sporting and body cultures also. What’s more, in many cases those pre-existing sport cultures provide the basis for those built from the newly globalised sport practices of the later 19th century.

In building this case he unpicks the three great institutions of diffusion – the school, the club, and industry – to argue that while they all existed, and that there was a notable British presence in many settings, to claim that they were the British instruments of a British sports culture does not stand up to inquiry. Here he draws on a growing body of recent South American scholarship, much of which is available only in Spanish or Portuguese (but increasingly in English, via journals such as the International Journal of the History of Sport – in which I declare an interest as an editor) that shows the ways that much of the continent’s sport practices and institutions were the consequence of local activities, decisions, and agency. This is a delightfully revisionist argument in that it does not deny that British presence, it just makes clear that the situation was more complex.

In the second part of the discussion he shifts focus from the process of growth, development and expansion of sport to look at what sports were played, by whom, why, and what sorts of social significance they may have had. Here he groups this discussion, in its first stages, into sports marked by beauty (as in style, motion, ugliness, and more), endurance (allowing discussions of cycling, climbing, running, and long distance swimming), controlled violence (boxing, football, and so forth), and technology (such as motor sports, flying, but also institutionalisation and records, and mediated audienceship via radio). Beauty and endurance allow for rich discussions of the gendering of sport, while the ‘controlled violence’ discussion includes insight to discourses of race and questions of Blackness and Whiteness. This is a sharp and insightful classification of sport and body culture practices that unsettles conventional typologies of sport while also avoiding the code-by-code approach understanding sport practice.

He then closes out the analysis with an exploration of the growing discourses of nationhood and nationalism in South American sport, and with a close reading of the 1930 football world cup dominated by South American teams. In doing so he draws together the earlier strands, locates South American sport institutions and athletes in a global context, and teases out the uncomfortable, in places antagonistic, relationship in sport between local and global histories, significance, and standing. This, then, is a powerful and insightful multilingual, multinational continental history of sport – and therein lies its more subtle strength; this is a continental history so includes evidence and analyses of French, British, and Dutch activities in Guiana, but does not draw in the former Spanish colonies in Central America – it is a history contained by its geographical space and as such also disrupts the dominant nation-state basis of nearly all sport history.

Brown quite explicitly sets out to unsettle the colonial framing of South American sport. He achieves that and more, giving us a superb decolonisation of South American history accentuating sport and body cultures that pre-existed football and other Euro-modern sports. In ‘reading against the grain’ of dominant approaches to the field and the continent, Brown challenges us to think the field differently. In doing so has given us one of the best sport histories I have read in years and book that merits close study well beyond its specific geographical and subject focus. It is an extremely sophisticated analysis that wears its sophistication lightly. Simply, outstanding.

August 26: delighted to hear that the Portuguese version is out soon, and that a Spanish version is in preparation.