Introduction

Leisure, as Peter Bailey has suggested, is now seen belatedly in its own right ‘as a significant element of social experience, whose history is of particular importance in the broader exercise of reconstructing the kind of lives lived by the ordinary people of the past’. Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism is concerned essentially with sport as a cultural phenomenon in Britain and its imperial territories, lost and retained, from the period of the Industrial Revolution to the Great War, and Hobsbawm’s contention is confidently extended in this volume beyond Europe to these possessions. And while various invented traditions associated with sport in Motherland and Empire are examined by these writers, traditional mythologies associated with sport are exposed in Williams’ account of the disjunction between image and reality in the attempted creation of ‘Welshness’ through rugby football, and in Odendaal’s investigation of the extent of black imperial middle-class athletic activities in nineteenth-century South Africa.