ABSTRACT
Relocating Sports History within Leisure History There is a tradition in sports history of expressing concern that the field is in danger of losing sight of wider historiographical questions and issues. Such warnings stretch back to, at the very least, James Walvin in the very first issue of the British Journal of Sports History, but as recently as 2013, Paul Ward claimed that ‘those concerned with the welfare of sport history have seen its ghettoisation as a particularly problematic’.1 Sports historians should be more willing, so such criticisms go, to engage with mainstream history (mainstream history presumably being social, political, and economic). Without wishing to dredge up these old points of contention, countervailing lines of reasoning have normally taken one of two forms. First, as Richard Holt warned in 1996, in actuality there is sometimes the risk that sports historians attempt to provide so much context that mainstream historical backgrounds swallow sports history whole.2 Second, it remains important to consider how boundaries of sport are maintained via its clubs and institutions, and part of this process involves the demarcating of sport and its histories as distinct to other leisure forms. To put it bluntly, why shouldn’t there be room in sports history for studies concerned with sport and its own specificities? Yet even with arguments and counter-arguments so well-rehearsed, the debate never seems far from resurfacing.
