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Global Sport Business Journal

Abstract

Author Chris McMillan, through Cricket, Capitalism and Class: From the Village Green to the Cricket Industry, provides a definitive and compelling critical sociological investigation of modern cricket’s rise from an English leisure pursuit and role in the expanding capitalism of Empire to today’s multi-billion-dollar cricket industry. This account is constructed through a largely Marxist reading of the sport’s entwining with the processes of capitalism and class. Specifically, class and the class structures reproduced by and through cricket are seen as critical in reproducing a system favorable to both historical and contemporary exploitation and expropriation. As the book transitions from exploring cricket as an “ideological force within capitalism” (p. 106) to cricket as a “reflection of changes in capitalism in the twenty-first century” (p. 106), McMillan includes global perspectives from India, the West Indies, and South Africa, as well as consideration of cricket and the intersections of race, gender, and the media. The theoretical underpinning for many of the points established by McMillan means the book will be of interest primarily to a (multi-disciplinary) scholarly audience. Saying that, cricket enthusiasts are also sure to find enjoyment in topics such as the roots of the “spirit of cricket” and class-based positional stacking in modern cricket.

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