ABSTRACT
The history of modern sports cannot be told without a fulsome account of the international relations that enfold them. International sports have not just been about competition, travel, and communication. They have often been mobilized for influence and power. In 1883, the Canadian George Beers, who refashioned the Haudenosaunee game of tewaarathon into the modern game of lacrosse, took two Montreal teams, one Euro-Canadian and the other Indigenous, to Britain to play a series of exhibitions. Imperialism was a powerful vehicle for sports. The history of sport and international relations has thus been extremely, even bewilderingly, complex, tumultuous, and far-reaching. The men and boys who developed the first prototypes of modern sports in the all-male ‘public schools’, universities, and private clubs of industrializing Britain imbued them with ideologies of respectable masculinity, self-improvement, nationalism, and progress. The international socialist movement had also opposed the arms race and the nation-state belligerence that led to the First World War.
