Bill Brown’s article “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism” is a pretty interesting read. He briefly traces some of the American global baseball tours of the early twentieth century, and also how the Japanese used baseball in 1914 as a tool to colonize the island of Truk, a Japanese colony in the Caroline Islands. Rather than providing a thorough historical account of the spread of baseball, however, Brown primarily focuses on how other writers have analyzed this process. The sources he refers to most often are “Waging Baseball On Truck,” a 1948 account of baseball in Truk by anthropologist George Murdock, America’s National Game, a 1911 history of the sport written by Alfred Spalding, a professional baseball player, owner, and sporting goods salesman, and Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell in Peru, a juvenile dime novel that follows a fictional baseball player on his adventures across the globe.

In examining these sources, in addition to providing me with useful leads for primary sources for this project (especially Spalding’s book), Brown identifies connections between American imperialism and sport, especially baseball. These writers identified baseball specifically, and sport more generally, legitimized and aided the colonial process. For Spalding, baseball was a way to “rationalize the non-American or newly American world” (Brown, 58). Patten’s novels presented a “baseball hero spectactularizing this world, preserving it as a sphere of adventure” (60). Murdock’s book examined how baseball, in a sense, replaced war for the Trukese, instead functioning as a “mimetic representation of war…facilitate[ing] both the expression of violence and its restraint,” so that the islanders ceased constant wars and fit more neatly into a capitalist-colonial model (52).

Brown is not the first person to write about the connections between sport and the “civilizing” process of colonialism. We’ve read some of this dialog in this class in Brownell’s work. One interesting element of Brown’s piece, however, is that he inverts this idea and argues that “war—or, more exactly, American imperialist activity, both military and economic––makes sports more comprehensible, integrating them into the mainstream of early twentieth-century society” (58).

Citation: Bill Brown, “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism,” in Cultural Critique, no. 17, 1990. Accessed at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354139