Winner
Matthew Brown – Sports in South America: A History
Matthew Brown’s history of sport in South America until about 1930 debunks the simplistic notion that sport was a uniquely British invention dispersed around the world. He does so first by showing that there was a rich and complex sporting culture well before the British cultural forces arrived. Not only was there an impressive set of Indigenous sporting activities, but the colonists – mainly Spanish and Portuguese descent – had sophisticated sporting and body cultures also. What’s more, in many cases those pre-existing sport cultures provide the basis for those built from the newly globalised sport practices of the later 19th century. In building this case he unpicks the school, the club, and industry as essential layers in this history and explores the growth, development and expansion of sport to by considering them as marked by aesthetics, endurance, controlled violence, and technology. In doing so he explicitly unsettles the colonial framing of South American sport. In ‘reading against the grain’ of dominant approaches to the field and the continent, Brown challenges us to think the field differently.
Shortlist
Roger Domeneghetti – Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Britain, Sport and the 1980s 
Roger Domemghetti focuses on the social and cultural history of the 1980s. His ability to weave together sporting and other social and cultural developments, his attention to shifting political cultures, and depiction of the era’s ambience all mark the quality of this as a scholarly exploration of the era. He builds a case that is episodic, where events and moments speak to contexts, and where those dialogues inform both an understanding of the era and provide rich insight to shifting sporting practices and cultures. This humane and humanising approach is a feature of the book. The book’s episodic form – this is no year on year linear narrative – provides ways into the era, making meaning and giving insight to both socio-cultural shifts and changes in the form, shape, practice, and context of sport as a cultural phenomenon. Domeneghetti gives us a sense of the era, its cultural, social, emotional, and political feeling that sport, as an emotional as much as a physical pastime, is so good at revealing. This is sport history as a means to provide an excellent, accessible, informed way into the era.
Rachel Hewitt – In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors
Rachel Hewitt’s impressive and engaging exploration of women’s outdoor physical activity both bridges important gaps in understanding and builds compelling commonalities in women’s experiences of the outdoors across 140 or more years. The focus of her historical inquiry is an Anglo-Irish woman, landowner, and mountain climber Lizzie Le Blond who provides a sense of the depth and sophistication of women’s outdoor lives and activities. Hewitt explores the ways that Lizzie’s late 19th and early 20th century experiences link to and illustrate the commonalities in women’s early 21st century experiences, reflecting on women’s contemporary outdoor physical activity. More innovatively, Hewitt explores what Lizzie’s life tells us about the changing Victorian attitudes to women’s outdoor lives and physicality, showing that the exclusions we associate with the era were not an ahistorical static phenomenon, but developed shifting from tolerance, sometimes begrudging, to active exclusion by the early 20th century. In doing so, Hewitt draws a subtle and nuanced picture of shifting attitudes, approaches, and outlooks in ways that inform the contemporary while also maintaining the distinctiveness of the past.
Alex Ireland – Pretty Poly: The History of the Football Shirt
Alex Ireland investigates and extends understandings of sports uniforms as standing in for all manner of being and identities. He reminds us here that the uniform is quite recent in sport. In his focus on football shirts he gives insight to this history and the design, production, and semiotic challenges of the ever changing, multiple shirt designs a year we see in football, while showing just how recent those trends are. He does this by tracing the emergence of the football shirt, its design features, exploring both the impacts of commercialisation and technical capabilities especially printing and fabrics. In addition he steps into business history and discussion of the design and production process while also grappling with environmental costs and production ethics. This is very much a focus on the shirt as artefact, as cultural identity marker, and as informing ways we make sense of sporting iconography. All this adds up to be a layered, richly cast unpacking of a ubiquitous and meaningful aspect of contemporary popular culture.
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff – Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA
Sarah Lindsay Krasnoff has provided a sharp and insightful exploration of French basketball both as a nexus of French metropolitan practice and residual imperial links in Africa and the Caribbean and as interwoven to the game in the USA points to a much more complex global dynamic. She looks at the influence of the US game in France during the post war era. She also powerfully and convincingly weaves together the three spaces of the French world – the metropolitan, Caribbean, and African – as having a significance impact of the developing French game. The second strand then looks at the French presence in the US game stressing that it is both women and men whose presence is helping reshape the US game while also informing the developing French basketball prowess. Finally, she considers these two dynamics as shaping and influencing the current global shape of the game and puts them within existing contemporary networks and tendencies. All in all, this is a vital, well-grounded contemporary history of cultural interchange and global sport practice.
Mark Orton – Football and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Argentina: La Nuestra
Mark Orton explores the claim that a distinctive, almost unique, national style is rigorously made in Argentina, with its notion of La Nuestra, as a product of the country’s distinctive culture, history, and geography, projecting Argentina to the world. La Nuestra as a distinctive style and spirit is imbued with nationalist claims, including that it marks the separation of Argentine football from its English, or rather British, origins, asserting an identity beyond empire, or Britain’s informal empire given that Argentina was never formally colonised. The book mounts a powerful critique of nation as narrowly based and with the partial assimilation of Others without transformation of the state or national imaginary. This critique of La Nuestra as a nationally specific sourced style of play should push us to think harder about national mythologies and the image of nationhood in sport.