A Very Social History: South American Cricketing Tourists in Britain in 1932

Abstract Drawing on both the rich Anglophone cricket historiography and the new Latin American sports scholarship, this article maps out the entangled global networks that shaped the tour of Britain made in 1932 by a team of South American cricketers. The piece arguing that the social side of the tour – visits, dinners, introductions – was more important than the sporting side. As British influence in Latin America – often called ‘informal empire’ – declined, the cricketers’ tour was an attempt, both from South America and from Britain, to re‐build an economic relationship that had been built around trusted contacts, social networks and personal relationships. The scheduling and reporting of the tour's matches, lunches and dinners reveal much about an imperial project in Latin America that was as much about dreams of prestige, status and values on both sides of the Atlantic as it was about maximizing profit and returns on investment.