ABSTRACT
1. Our principal task in this conclusion is to bring together the threads of our analysis and to tease out its implications for the theoretical issues outlined in the Introduction. There are three such issues: (i) the light our study sheds on the reasons why Britain was not only the first industrial but also the first ‘sporting nation’; (ii) the implications of our analysis for Elias’ theory of the ‘civilizing process’, more specifically for his hypothesis that there has occurred in West European societies, a long-term change in standards of violence-control; and (iii) the light thrown by our study on the structural sources of the worldwide trend towards greater seriousness of participation in, and greater cultural centrality of, sport. Most of our attention will be devoted to the second and third issues. We shall begin, however, by briefly considering the first.
