Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Cricket pastoral and Englishness
- 2 Cricket in the eighteenth century
- 3 Corruption in cricket
- 4 Broadcasting and cricket in England
- 5 Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity
- 6 Don Bradman: just a boy from Bowral
- 7 The Packer cricket war
- 8 New Zealand cricket and the colonial relationship
- 9 C. L. R. James and cricket
- 10 Reading Brian Lara and the traditions of Caribbean cricket poetry
- 11 The detachment of West Indies cricket from the nationalist scaffold
- 12 The Indian Premier League and world cricket
- 13 Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture
- 14 Conflicting loyalties: nationalism and religion in India–Pakistan cricket relations
- 15 Cricket and representations of beauty: Newlands Cricket Ground and the roots of apartheid in South African cricket
- 16 Writing the modern game
- 17 Cricket and international politics
- Further reading
- Index
8 - New Zealand cricket and the colonial relationship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Cricket pastoral and Englishness
- 2 Cricket in the eighteenth century
- 3 Corruption in cricket
- 4 Broadcasting and cricket in England
- 5 Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity
- 6 Don Bradman: just a boy from Bowral
- 7 The Packer cricket war
- 8 New Zealand cricket and the colonial relationship
- 9 C. L. R. James and cricket
- 10 Reading Brian Lara and the traditions of Caribbean cricket poetry
- 11 The detachment of West Indies cricket from the nationalist scaffold
- 12 The Indian Premier League and world cricket
- 13 Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture
- 14 Conflicting loyalties: nationalism and religion in India–Pakistan cricket relations
- 15 Cricket and representations of beauty: Newlands Cricket Ground and the roots of apartheid in South African cricket
- 16 Writing the modern game
- 17 Cricket and international politics
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Cricket as ‘cultural baggage’, 1840–1870
Cricket was an integral part of the ‘cultural baggage’ which accompanied the European settlement of New Zealand during the nineteenth century. Missionaries encouraged Maori interest in the game from as early as 1832, but substantive growth came only with the distinct patterns of provincial settlement from the 1840s. The so-called ‘systematic colonisation’ schemes promoted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield ensured that cricket, as an essential institution of England in general and its leisured class in particular, emerged early and naturally, when one might normally expect other amenities and necessities of colonial life to have taken priority. As the tensions of industrial transformation and rapid post-Napoleonic social change came to a head during the early 1830s, Wakefield sought to create a safety valve for British society through colonisation. In addition to a migrant population carefully selected with regard to gender balance and personal morality, his prime mechanism was a ‘sufficient price’ on land – set at such a level as to both limit the number of colonial landowners, and regulate class relationships by creating a subservient workforce among those without means to purchase. With population distribution confined in this way, the perceived chaos and dislocation of ‘frontier’ settlements in Australia and North America would be avoided. Wakefield envisioned an essentially conservative pre-industrial rural idyll described by Keith Sinclair as ‘a vertical section of English society excluding the lowest stratum. It would form not a “new people”, but an “extension” of an old, retaining its virtues, but eliminating its poverty and overcrowding.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Cricket , pp. 116 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011