Introduction: The Empire and Commonwealth Games and the Challenge of History

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Notes

1. To avoid anachronisms, when discussing the whole series from 1930 to the present I will use the (admittedly slightly awkward) term Empire/Commonwealth Games in this Introduction. When an individual event is mentioned, I will call it by the competition name that was then in use.

2. See, for example, Martin Polley, ‘Inspire a Publication: Books, Journals and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’, in Handbook of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Volume Two: Celebrating the Games, ed. Vassil Girginov (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 255–65.

3. Brian Oliver, The Commonwealth Games: Extraordinary Stories Behind the Medals (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

4. This has gone through many editions, and is regularly up-dated for each Olympic Games. For the most recent, see David Wallechinsky and Jaime Loucky, The Complete Book of the Olympics (London: Aurum Press, 2012).

5. Cleve Dheensaw, The Commonwealth Games: the First Sixty Years, 1930–1990 (Victoria, BC: Orca, 1994).

6. Katherine Moore, ‘The Pan-Britannic Festival: a Tangible but Forlorn Expression of Imperial Unity’, in Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad 1700–1914, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 144–62; ‘The Warmth of Comradeship: the First British Empire Games and Imperial Solidarity’, International Journal of the History of Sport 6, no. 2 (1989); ‘A Neglected Imperialist: the Promotion of the British Empire in the Writing of John Astley Cooper’, International Journal of the History of Sport 8, no. 2 (1991).

7. Daniel Gorman, ‘Amateurism, Imperialism, Internationalism and the First British Empire Games’, International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 4 (2010); Michael Dawson, ‘Acting Global, Thinking Local: “Liquid Imperialism” and the Multiple Meanings of the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games’, International Journal of the History of Sport 23, no. 1 (2006); D. Macintosh, D. Greenhorn, and D. Black, ‘Canadian Diplomacy and the 1978 Edmonton Commonwealth Games’, Journal of Sport History 19, no. 1 (1992), 26–55; Jackie MacDonald and Ann Hall, ‘Remembering “The Forgotten Games”: a Reinterpretation of the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games’, Sport History Review 40, no. 2 (2009), 111–25; J. Beck, ‘The Forgotten Games: Fifth British Empire and Commonwealth Games, Vancouver, 1954’, Sport History Review 35, no. 1 (2004).

8. Philip Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: the House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

9. See, for example, David Whitson and Donald Macintosh, ‘The Global Circus: International Sport, Tourism, and the Marketing of Cities’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 20, no. 3 (1996), 278–95; David Black. ‘Dreaming Big: the Pursuit of “Second Order” Games as a Strategic Response to Globalization’, Sport in Society 11, no. 4 (2008), 467–80; Michael Silk, ‘Together We're One? The “Place” of the Nation in Media Representations of the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games’, Sociology of Sport Journal 18, no. 3 (2001); Girish Ramchandani and Darryl Wilson, ‘India's Performance in the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games – Expected or Otherwise?’, Managing Leisure 17, no. 2/3 (2012), 257–73; Geoff Nichols and Rita Ralston, ‘Lessons from the Volunteering Legacy of the 2002 Commonwealth Games’, Urban Studies 49, no. 1 (2012), 169–84. It is also worth noting that the opportunities presented by the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games gave rise to English Heritage's first real engagement with sporting heritage, and thus inspired their ‘Played in Britain’ project. See Malcolm Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Simon Inglis, Played in Manchester: the Architectural Heritage of a City at Play (Swindon: English Heritage, 2004), 14–21; Inglis, Played in Manchester, 52–7.

10. John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter, eds, Sports Mega-Events: Social Scientific Analyses of a Global Phenomenon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

11. The ten teams, with the year in which they achieved test status, are Australia (1877), England (1877), South Africa (1889), West Indies (1928), New Zealand (1930), India (1932), Pakistan (1952), Sri Lanka (1982), Zimbabwe (1992), and Bangladesh (2000).

12. Moore, ‘Neglected Imperialist’.

13. The ten are Cameroon, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda, St Lucia, Seychelles, and Vanuatu.