Contested Fields (Paperback)

Paperback. Few cultural activities speak more powerfully to international histories of the modern world than football. In the late nineteenth century, this cheap and simple sport emerged as a major legacy of Britains formal and informal empires and spread quickly across Europe, South America, and Africa. Today, football (known to many as soccer) is arguably the worlds most popular pastime, an activity played and watched by millions of people around the globe. Contested Fields introduces readers to key aspects of the global game, synthesizing research on footballs transnational role in reflecting and shaping political, socio-economic, and cultural developments over the past 150 years. Each chapter uses case studies and cutting-edge scholarship to analyze an important element of footballs international story: migration, money, competition, gender, race, space, spectatorship, and confrontation. Interrogating the costs and benefits of the games controversial path to global pre-eminence, Contested Fields shows how and why football matters in the modern world as part of the social fabric and as a site of political power and resistance. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …