ABSTRACT
Postmodernism, Roy Porter suggests, in his dazzling Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World ‘has one virtue at least — it has reopened inquiries into modernity and its origins’. 1 Porter is of the firm opinion that the eighteenth century was crucial to the creation of modern mentalities; the claim is made here with equal firmness that the nineteenth century was crucial to the creation of modern sports — both developments, if not perhaps of the same magnitude, are of immense contemporary global significance. If Porter is of the contentious view that British thinkers were prominent in the eighteenth-century intellectual revolution, the uncontentious argument is advanced here that British sportsmen were pre-eminent in the nineteenth-century modern sports revolution. They comprised a cadre of international cultural brokers. 2
