Windrush Cricket - Collins P. Michael

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 so
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