Beyond diffusion: sport and its remaking in cross-cultural contexts

Project MUSE - Journal of Sport History - Beyond Diffusion: Sport and Its Remaking in Cross-Cultural Contexts Project MUSE Journals Journal of Sport History Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2010 Beyond Diffusion: Sport and Its Remaking in Cross-Cultural Contexts Journal of Sport History Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2010 E-ISSN: 2155-8455 Print ISSN: 0094-1700 Beyond Diffusion:Sport and Its Remaking in Cross-Cultural Contexts Maarten van Bottenburg†Utrecht School of GovernanceUtrecht University In 1983, sports historian Allen Guttmann wrote that the ideal history of European sport had not yet been written and probably never would be. What he could use instead at that time was "a handful of broadly conceived books, mostly collective efforts which tend to be long on data and short on interpretation, and a medley of monographs, some of which are quite admirable." Twenty-six years later, this situation has changed significantly. Today, there is a substantial and ever-growing literature on the history of sport in Europe, which is by and large empirically robust and theoretically informed, with a large number of national historiographies and many articles, books and volumes on various themes such as national identity, gender, social class and so on. Nevertheless, a comprehensive, synthetic volume on the history of European sport is still lacking. Books like European Cultures in Sport (2003) are collections of case studies in which the history of sport in...