The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life

Abstract

that comparatively little work has considered the dissemination, displacement and adoption of imperial sports in ‘peripheral’ (5) contexts such as the Pacific Islands. What his book demonstrates is just how much we can learn from ‘sporting histories at the “edges of empire”’ – including how such work ‘can enrich and extend our understanding of themes pertaining to power, politics, identity and cultural resistance’ (6). How cricket, the most quintessentially English of sports, was received, adapted, appropriated, and transformed by the peoples of Samoa during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries may initially appear to be a somewhat ‘niche’ topic. However, what Sacks presents in this book is clearly applicable to other contexts. It is a theoretically informed, empirically rich account of a very specific case of cross-cultural engagement which exceeds its distinctive context and historical circumstances, enhancing and advancing the fields of sport history, imperial history, and the sociology and anthropology of sport more generally.