ABSTRACT
As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wore on, an ambivalent sense of the colonial cricket field as a place of both imperial accomplishment and anxiety became a feature of its literary representations. The dissemination of cricket throughout the British Empire in often informal, uneven and geographically specific ways was not part of a straightforward, centrally controlled and consciously executed 'civilising mission'. In the white settler colonies of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the playing of cricket was initially simply part of the cultural baggage of emigration, whereas the cricket fields of India and the British West Indies were initially places from which non-whites were excluded before liberalisation gradually allowed a degree of carefully controlled access. A body of missionary cricket literature testifies that in certain locations the sport was introduced to native populations as an instrument of religious conversion, so inextricably bound up was it with the doctrines of Protestant Christianity.
