Sports in South America: A History, with Prof. Matthew Brown

Sports in South America: A History

with Professor Matthew Brown

Canning House welcomes Professor Matthew Brown, Professor in Latin American History at the University of Bristol, to a London launch of his new book: Sports in South America: A History (Yale University Press, 2023). Dr Rory Miller, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, will act as discussant.

Sports in South America follows the transformation of sporting cultures in South America leading up to Uruguay’s hosting of the first FIFA Men’s World Cup in 1930. Matthew shows how South American soccer culture, envied worldwide, sprang out of societies that were already playing and watching games well before British sportsmen arrived to teach “the beautiful game.”

These vibrant and distinct sporting traditions, including cycling, boxing, cockfighting, bullfighting, cricket, baseball, and horse racing, were marked by South American societies’ Indigenous and colonial pasts and by their leaders’ desire to participate in what they saw as a global movement toward human progress.

Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, Brown debunks legends, highlights the stories of forgotten sportswomen and Indigenous sports, and unpacks the social and cultural connections within South America and with the rest of the world.

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