West Indian people have made their greatest single cultural investment in cricket. This commitment of effort and emotion profoundly shaped the mindscape of citizens, and led to the allocation of scarce financial resources that enabled physical infrastructures to dominate the landscape of each territory. As a deeply rooted historical process it has had several implications for critical aspects of anti-colonialism and the nation- building project.

While the enormity of this enterprise is generally grasped, there are important aspects that often elude general attention. Two such aspects are the historic depth and ethnic participation of the process. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the zenith of the slavery period, masters and slaves were passionate participants in the game, and made separate preparations for its future. By the 1830s, when the regional slave system collapsed in the face of intense human-rights pressures, cricket was well on its way to becoming the first expression of Caribbean popular culture.

This experience in cultural development is often narrated without specific reference to its fundamental multi-ethnic nature. While colonial white elites imported and domesticated the game, branding it for respectability with the ‘whites only’ tag, equally important was its appropriation by disenfranchised blacks who propelled its development as a site of racial and class contest. By the mid nineteenth century cricket had spilled out from these narrow social confines and found fertile ground in the larger communities of the emerging white and coloured middle classes, and the black labouring poor.