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The global ring? Boxing, mobility, and transnational networks in the anglophone world, 1890–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2013

Matthew Taylor
Matthew Taylor*
Affiliation:
International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK E-mail: mtaylor@dmu.ac.uk
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

boxinginternational regulationmobilitynetworkstransnationalism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , July 2013 , pp. 231 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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