This article explores the origins and early history of American football in relation to the development of rugby and similar codes in the English-speaking world of the last third of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the traditional narrative description of the emergence of the American game – which is ascribed in large part to the individual initiative of Walter Camp – fails to situate the sport in the context of the wider, transnational dynamics of the development of the various handling codes of football. In particular, it contends that the common assumption that the gridiron game's early development was a sporting expression of American exceptionalism is mistaken and that it only acquired its distinctive national character in the early twentieth century.

This article examines professional boxing as a compelling and dynamic example of globalization from below between 1890 and 1914. It explores the sport's fluctuating legal and organizational status and maps the movement of professional boxers – and the networks that facilitated this movement – across the anglophone world. Boxing was particularly suited to cross-national mobility because it developed alongside, and built upon, the global circuits of the late nineteenth-century entertainment industry. Yet the main sites of the anglophone boxing world were not connected in any structured or standardized fashion. Channels of communication and routes of traffic were continually shifting, with no one city, region or nation emerging as a consistent hub of activity. This article explores boxing's fluid, multiple and loosely structured ‘networks’, and shows how the sport remained largely resistant to international regulation and standardization in this period.

Action sports such as beach volleyball and snowboarding have recently become popular commodities at the Olympics. While some observers view these new sports as global phenomena with transnational origins, they were incubated in California and are linked to the promotion of American visions of affluence. The encroachment of these sports onto global stages at the Olympics signals the continuing historical power of Californization, a particular brand of Americanization. The efforts to Californize the world through Olympic sports is considerably older than the debut of action sports, dating to the 1920s and 1930s when a coalition of US government agents, sports promoters, and corporate entrepreneurs began to articulate a strategy to mask Americanization campaigns in the world's leading sporting event under the veneer of California style. In the process they ‘dis’-invented historical traditions, in particular Olympic sports, in order to amplify their prospects in global markets.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) played a major role in the transformation of association football into a global game. Between 1912 and 1974, before the era of rapid economic sports globalization, FIFA officials attempted to extend the boundaries of the football empire by creating the World Cup and trying to convert new parts of the world to the people's game. It was not an easy task since they met with resistance, obstruction, and contestation. They had to revise their Eurocentric way of thinking and be willing to negotiate. Far from being a mere imperialist process, the path to world football consisted of a series of exacting exchanges and mutual misunderstandings, especially with the South American associations. It is not clear that FIFA officials always understood the demands of the developing football world but they were often able to negotiate and adapt their discourses towards non-European national associations and continental confederations. By doing so, they helped to create, if not an equal football world, at least an international world space.

This article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.

This article seeks to reposition sport as a subject of analysis in ‘global historical’ processes. It examines the diffusion of cricket in the British empire, its appropriation by the colonies, and the subsequent commercialization of the sport. It asks the question: how did an elite English sport come to be one controlled by a former colony – India? With this as the substantive question, it seeks to develop theoretical insights about the nature of global processes and cultural transfers in the twentieth century. By way of conclusion, it asserts that, as a result of these global processes, there was a tangible shift in the ‘cultural economy’ of sports from the developed nations of the West to the developing nations.

This article argues for the importance of an exploration of sporting interactions in the British world. In addition, it presents the case for the adaptation of borderlands theory to the British world framework. Such study of British world borderlands is capable of more accurately capturing the spatial and regional variety of this British world and, in particular, the nascent national identities of dominions such as Australia. Sport is a particularly apt vehicle for the examination of such issues in an Australian context, since playing to the ‘imaginary grandstand’ of international spectators has always occupied a central role in the construction of an Australian national identity. This article uses three brief case studies – cricket, swimming, and Australian Rules football – to explore these theoretical claims.