ABSTRACT
In 2014, at a conference in Wuhan in China’s Hubei Province where I gave a keynote lecture in sport and class in the United Kingdom, I was asked by a member of the audience what sports the British peasants play. It was a salutary reminder that our understanding of the concept of social class varies dramatically from place to place and from one era to another. Yet, the ways in which we use our bodies, not least when we play, watch and administer sport, are closely interwoven with social class through both time and space. This has been particularly true in Britain, where Karl Marx produced much of his influential analysis of class relations in nineteenth-century capitalist societies and modern sport was born. As Selina Todd (2015: 1) observes, ‘Class has united and divided Britain since the Industrial Revolution.’
