Manufactured Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality, and Militarism by J.A. Mangan (review)

Manufactured Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality, and Militarism offers insights that even those who thought they knew everything about the emergence of “athleticism” in the mid nineteenth century in what was then the world’s wealthiest nation (and its dissemination throughout the British Empire) are likely to find new and intriguing. The ideology of “athleticism” did far more to create and maintain the Empire than most individuals may realize. This more than 400-page collection of articles, book chapters, and public lectures by the noted scholar James A. (“Tony”) Mangan is a “must read” for historians, social scientists, political scientists, and academics in many fields as well as for those whose primary interest is the history of sport.

More than four billion people watched at least a portion of the 2012 London and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The 2010 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup matches held in South Africa attracted viewers in every country and territory of the world. The major impetus for such events—and for the world-wide interest in sports that exists today—was the nineteenth-century British “public school” system of the middle and upper middle classes. These matters are examined with remarkable insight in Manufactured Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality, and Militarism.

In the prologue to his path-breaking book Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (1981) Mangan had cited the “obscure” schoolmaster J.H. Simpson’s 1923 assertion that games had become a “pervasive feature” of the public school system that produced projects that controlled over a quarter of the world. Therefore, “the study of ‘athleticism’ was crucial to a comprehension of the system as a whole” (p. 1). However, no such study then existed. With the commitment and originality that his many publications reflect, Mangan set about filling this void. In The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (1986) he credited Sir Charles Tennyson’s 1959 Victorian Studies article, “They Taught the World to Play,” with bringing to the attention of readers the importance that the public schools and ancient universities had had in the “diffusion around the globe of British nineteenth-century ball games” (p. 17). However, as he perceptively pointed out, to help achieve fuller understandings of the global consequences much more needed to be done to explain why earlier nineteenth century ways of valuing “manliness” such as self-denial and rectitude changed during the Victorian period to robustness, perseverance, and stoicism. The major proselytizing tool was the games field and the values it supposedly inculcated. Games quickly rose to enormous popularity at many public schools and were transmitted throughout the expanding Empire by men who had attended them. The creation and dissemination of this “imperial masculinity” is the major focus of Manufactured Masculinity.

The Prologue is followed by a section titled “Metamorphosis,” which moves the reader from the lawlessness and brutality that characterized public schools at the time that Thomas Arnold became headmaster at Rugby in 1828 to the control, toughness, and other values that were indispensable for extending and protecting the Empire. Changes were implemented shortly before Thomas Hughes’s romanticized novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays appeared in 1857. The significant instrument of change was George E.L. Cotton, who had become headmaster at Marlborough College in 1852. In the chapter aptly titled “From Hooligans to Heroes and from Ferocity to Fair Play: Some English Historical Origins of Modern World Sport,” Mangan states that Cotton was at least as important as was Pierre de Coubertin in transforming English public school sport into a worldwide phenomenon. To gain control over the ungovernable pupils whom he had inherited Cotton quickly divided the school into “houses” of fifty boys, each with a “housemaster” chosen for his enthusiasm for games, and introduced such things as leagues and cups to distract, enthuse, and exhaust the pupils. Anxious to survive, many...