Michael P Collins | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael P Collins

Wisden, 2024

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The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, published in June 2023, was unequivocal that "deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism continue to exist across the game". Our report, as made explicit in its opening pages, was not just about racism. Equally important, we wrote, cricket is marked by "structural and institutional sexism and class-based discrimination". In addition to entrenched racism, our report found that women cricketers and staff are marginalised, and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. We also found, unsurprisingly, that class prejudice is extensive, that the dominance of private schools constitutes a deep divide-in terms of cricket's culture and its resources-and that this schism underpins cricket's talent pathway, determining who gets to progress through it, and ultimately represent their country.

SI-UK India, 2024

Beyond Borders: history, India, Rabindranath Tagore, Indo-British relations, education and ‘Disag... more Beyond Borders: history, India, Rabindranath Tagore, Indo-British relations, education and ‘Disagreeing Well’. UCL historian Dr Michael Collins talking all things India, studying in the UK, London, UK-India education, Liberal Arts, Creative Thinking, and the need to "Disagree Well" ... with the inevitable cricket question thrown in at the end!

Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, 2023

I was really honoured to be asked by UCL's Jessica Thomas to write a “research spotlight” piece f... more I was really honoured to be asked by UCL's Jessica Thomas to write a “research spotlight” piece for the UCL website. It prompted a bit more personal reflection than I initially envisaged. #wideningparticipation #highereducation #ucl

Holding up a Mirror to Cricket, 2023

Cricket venerates both its history and its literary culture. English cricket’s long period of dev... more Cricket venerates both its history and its literary culture. English cricket’s long period of development establishes cricket as a link to the nation’s past. But insofar as all history is narrative, and historians are in the business of selecting topics and information out of which they fashion those narratives, our game is also highly selective in what it chooses to recall. Nostalgic visions of Lord’s as the ‘home of cricket’, MCC as the originator and arbiter of the game’s rules, and the English as the original cricket nation are symbols of prestige. They mix in the national imaginary with picture-postcards of cricket played in white flannels on pristine village greens; a link to an earlier and ‘simpler’ time.

Furthermore, when looking beyond England, to the fact that cricket is now a global game played by a very diverse range of people, we perhaps too easily trade on the notion that ‘cricket brings people together’. The ‘Spirit of Cricket’ set out in the preamble to the laws of the game states that cricket “brings together people from different nationalities, cultures and religions.” Whilst undoubtedly true - cricket is a shared heritage and shared language that crosses boundaries of nation, religion and ethnicity - it is also too simplistic.

By way of example consider the Barbados Cricket Buckle, an engraved belt buckle from the 1780s that depicts a slave, unmistakably in bondage, with bat in hand, in front of a set of stumps. It was found in a riverbed in the north of England in the 1970s. How it got there is unknown, but the artefact reminds us - despite the overwhelming emphasis in public discourse still being on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 - of Britain’s long history as one of the world’s biggest slave empires. It is also a striking depiction of how cricket was passed on and adopted often in the most unequal of contexts. Cricket ‘bringing people together’ takes on a different meaning when looked at from this perspective.

As such, we believe that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity, and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression.

Struggles have been waged between the rural and the urban; social classes; ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’; north and south; private and state educated; men and women; and, perhaps most starkly of all, between White colonisers and ‘non-White’ peoples, dating from the age of the British slave trade and imperialism but resonating far beyond, into the postcolonial age.

Most often, these conflicts have revolved around questions of power and control by an elite group. In this respect, cricket has often operated on the basis of barriers to access, and historically-excluded groups have been forced to go to extraordinary lengths to gain admittance to the privileged spaces of the playing field, the club, the dressing room, and the management committee. Importantly, these problems are far from being isolated in a distant past. Stereotypes about ‘racial characteristics’, the ‘proper’ role of men and women in the game, as well as tropes about class and regional differences have all been handed down over the generations.

We believe that it is vital for the game to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant of the ways in which both its past and present are imbued with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions.

We approach this task in the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, who famously prefaced his treatise on Caribbean cricket and colonialism – Beyond a Boundary (1963) – by asking “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” In other words, if we are to understand the nature and extent of (in)equity in cricket, our sense of what cricket history is must go beyond ‘the game’: dates, scorecards, names and numbers. Developing a better sense of cricket history reveals many of the unspoken assumptions, inherited from the past, that have enabled particular groups of people to dominate the game in terms of power and access to resources, whilst others have remained at the margins. It can also help everyone in the game gain a better understanding of where contemporary injustices have come from.

We offer a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments:

● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.

● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.

● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.

The Conversation, 2023

After more than two years of research, interviews and evidence gathering, a landmark report by th... more After more than two years of research, interviews and evidence gathering, a landmark report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) was published on June 27 2023. Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket contains strong and disturbing evidence about the class prejudice, racism and misogyny that runs through all levels of the game in England and Wales.

The Conversation, 2023

Cricket was played extensively in Britain in the 1950s, in towns, villages and cities, both in wo... more Cricket was played extensively in Britain in the 1950s, in towns, villages and cities, both in workplaces and as a social activity. And the sport had also become a ubiquitous cultural pastime in the English-speaking Caribbean.Indeed, cricket was a key part of Britain’s cultural imperialism, with the game helping to convey ideas about social order – in the colonial Caribbean, cricket clubs were segregated on the basis both of class and “race”. An emphasis on respecting the rules, “fair play” and sporting behaviour all enhanced this sense of white English prestige.
After the second world war, racism forced many new Windrush arrivals – predominantly black Caribbean men looking for employment in manual jobs – to set up their own cricket clubs.

The Political Quarterly, 2023

This article makes a contribution, based on previously unseen archival materials, to debates abou... more This article makes a contribution, based on previously unseen archival materials, to debates about the so-called 'decline' of black cricket in England. It discusses the historical context of the development of black cricket in the postwar period, and then presents a case study of the Haringey Cricket College-1984-1997-a black-led project in and around the deprived areas of Tottenham, north London, which produced more first-class cricketers than many of the most expensive, elite 'cricket schools' in England. In so doing, it achieved national and international acclaim. The article goes on to provide detailed evidence regarding the closure of the College, arguing that the College's demise should not be seen simply as part of a wider process of decreasing interest in cricket within England's black communities, but involved active decisions by the cricket establishment to not support the College. The article then goes on to raise wider questions about when and how it has been possible to be perceived as legitimately black and English in cricketing terms, and how cricket's authorities should respond to these historical problems.

The Political Quarterly, 2022

During 2021, long-standing concerns about racism in English cricket rose to the surface to become... more During 2021, long-standing concerns about racism in English cricket rose to the surface to become very public, political questions. For the purposes of clarity, this article begins by drawing a distinction between racism on the one hand and 'racial thinking' on the other. It suggests that racial thinking is related to, but analytically distinct from, and in fact prior to racism. It then goes on to develop a wider analysis of the historical connections between cricket, Englishness and racial thinking. With this in mind, the final section of the article draws on the preceding historical analysis to explore some of the more recent examples of racial thinking in cricket, and their implications for how we might approach the problem of racism in English cricket today.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2020

In addressing the relationship between national and international worldmaking political projects,... more In addressing the relationship between national and international worldmaking political projects, Adom Getachew's impressive and thought-provoking recent book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, seeks to move beyond recent debates between those who posit an inevitability thesis about the triumph of the nation-state after 1945, on the one hand, and those who insist on the possibilities of alternative pathways, on the other. The argument is compelling in demonstrating that the transcendence of race hierarchies was integral to arguments and aspirations about meaningful sovereignty. Getachew's central characters were visionaries in terms of imagining possible worlds beyond the nation-state. The book is less convincing in demonstrating that an intractable nationalism and indeed underlying racial thinking were not serious impediments to the achievement of these goals.

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect?, 2017

The Encyclopedia of Empire, 2016

The decolonization of the European overseas empires in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean came late,... more The decolonization of the European overseas empires in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean came late, and was rapidly concluded. Each moment of independence was exemplary, and contributed cumulatively to the accelerating process of change, especially after 1957. Anti-colonialists contributed greatly to this development, which was given institutional and legal meaning by way of independence as sovereign membership of the United Nations. But “flag independence” was not the end of decolonization as either a practical or intellectual problem: the legacies and consequences of decolonization remain very important. Formal independence was, though, indicative of a profound reshaping of the international system and its normative architecture after 1945. This may constitute the most significant aspect of decolonization as a process of historical change.

Diplomacy & Statecraft, 2013

Post-1945 decolonisation involved the universal acceptance of nation-statehood as the alternative... more Post-1945 decolonisation involved the universal acceptance of nation-statehood as the alternative to imperialism. Nationalism vanquished its transnational competitors, notably imperialism and Marxism. Alternatives to imperial rule that avoided sovereign states on national lines, such as federations in the later 1940s and 1950s, have received less attention from historians. Federations involved alternative ways of thinking about sovereignty, territoriality, and political economy. British interest in creating federations, for example the Central African Federation (CAF) in 1953, offers some new perspectives on the strength of imperial ideology and the determination to continue a missionary imperialism after the Second World War. Federal thinking and practice was prominent at this time in other European empires too, notably the French and Dutch ones. The federal idea was also an aspect of the emerging European community. This is suggestive of a wider “federal moment” that points to the importance of linking international, trans-national, imperial, and world historical approaches.

State and Society in South Asia: Themes of Assertion and Recognition, edited by C. Spiess & A. Fischer (New Delhi: Samskriti), Oct 2014

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2012

Caught between an arrogant European modernist elite and a proprietorial Indian nationalism, Tagor... more Caught between an arrogant European modernist elite and a proprietorial Indian nationalism, Tagore challenged the spatial dimensions of modernity by critiquing both Eurocentrism and a simplistic anti-imperialism. Tagore did build bridges with some Western intellectuals and social activists but much of his life illustrates the difficulties of meaningful cross-cultural relations and the shortcomings of a liberal ‘politics of friendship’. If this is in part due to the inadequacy of translation, then we need more and better translations. Rather than resurrecting a platitudinous ‘cosmopolitan’ World Citizen, Tagore's work should require us to think more critically about parallel modernities and different ways of imagining our futures. As China and India, perhaps above all others, grow in economic, political and cultural strength, these questions are likely to become more pressing.

openDemocracy, Sep 14, 2011

"The Bengali poet, writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) remains a unique, thoug... more "The Bengali poet, writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) remains a unique, though still under-recognised genius. Tagore’s cultural production was vast, covering poetry, prose and plays; an astonishing volume of music which is played and sung throughout Bengal to this day (and includes the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh); internationally acclaimed and exhibited paintings; social, political and philosophical essays; agrarian reform; pioneering environmentalism; the creation of a school and a university. His philosophy of education may yet come to be seen as one of his most significant contributions.

Despite all this, and compared to his contemporaries Gandhi and Nehru, relatively few people have heard of Rabindranath Tagore. A Titan of the Bengal Renaissance, Tagore was cast in Romantic mould by a briefly admiring modernist intelligentsia in England. In India he was feted but also castigated for supposedly betraying the nationalist Left. Much maligned and often misunderstood, recovering Tagore’s thought and life in all its complexity is important today – as the twenty-first century eclipse of the West by the East unfolds – for the fact that he tried to imagine and articulate an alternative modernity: not a Eurocentric one but a parallel Indian or ‘Eastern’ modernity that would necessarily involve inter-cultural dialogue and convergence. Tagore would have passionately opposed the post-9/11 ‘clash of civilisations’ argument."

The Statesman, Kolkata, May 7, 2011

As perhaps the most famous of Tagore’s Western interlocutors, Yeats often features in commentarie... more As perhaps the most famous of Tagore’s Western interlocutors, Yeats often features in commentaries on Tagore and the West, most specifically regarding Tagore’s visit to Britain in 1912 and Yeats’ role as midwife to Tagore’s Western reputation. Yeats’ role in securing the Nobel Prize for Rabindranath has been exaggerated: actually, a member of the Nobel Committee read Tagore in Bengali and they awarded the prize on the basis of many more texts than Gitanjali alone. Even so, it is almost universally assumed that Tagore recognised in Yeats a common poetic genius, and that Yeats, in turn, recognised Tagore as a ‘great poet’. But this is quite misleading. Tagore saw Yeats as a junior and less-accomplished man. Yeats’ knowledge of Tagore was embarrassingly vague and he himself had suggested that honouring Tagore in those early years was a piece of ‘wise imperialism’.

Rather than genuine dialogue and mutual learning, Yeats was more interested in instrumentalising Tagore – and the East more generally – as part of a project of European cultural recovery. Tagore functioned not as an independent thinker or agent of historical change in his own right, but as something of an aesthetic object. And when that object of fascination developed a voice beyond the pretty emotions of Gitanjali; when Tagore sought to lecture, educate and sometimes denounce the West in English, or to deepen the West’s understanding of Indian philosophy, his audience of admirers soon changed their mind. ‘Damn Tagore’, Yeats wrote in 1935, ‘he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English’. The early green shoots of cross-cultural growth did not last even into the summer of 1913 when Pound decided that Tagore’s philosophy had little to offer anyone who had ‘felt the pangs’ and been ‘pestered with Western civilisation’. Yeats soon distanced himself from Tagore, and whilst his encounters with Indian philosophy and religious thought outlasted the Tagore moment, he found it difficult to move beyond the gauche problematic posed by Pound: ‘Why should India’, Yeats asked in the 1930s, ‘be always thinking of peace – shanti? Life is a conflict’.

Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Oct 2008

""Tagore’s anti-nationalism was born out of the violence that engulfed the anti-partition movemen... more ""Tagore’s anti-nationalism was born out of the violence that engulfed the anti-partition movement in Bengal between 1905 and 1908. Lord Curzon sought to divide the Hindu and Muslim communities of the large and politically active Bengal Presidency, and in response the swadeshi (self-sufficiency) movement in Bengal anticipated Gandhi with its boycott of British goods. Tagore had initially supported the movement but soon turned away in disgust after it spiralled into violence. This was a seminal moment in Tagore’s life. He was less interested in the conditions under which it becomes conceivable for people to act violently than any socialist might have been. Tagore’s belief was rather that freedom cannot solely be attained through the instrumental rationality of politics, of which violence is a subset. The desire to shape or seize control of structures of power – state, army, police, even the economy – is insufficient unless we are willing to also look within at values, beliefs and culture. ‘The way of bloody revolution’, Tagore added, ‘is not the true way’: ‘a political revolution is like taking a short cut to nothing’. This could be seen as Tagore’s answer to the ‘two vital questions about the search for liberation in our times’ that Ashis Nandy has pointed to: ‘namely, why dictatorships of the proletariat never end and why revolutions always devour their children’.

Both Tagore and Gandhi agreed that there was to be nothing passive about resistance, but Tagore could not tolerate the negativity of book burning or education boycotts, which he saw as an offence against a higher ideal of cooperation. The differences between Tagore and Gandhi have been over-stated at times, but differences there were and their debates through the 1920s and 1930s about the nature of freedom deserve much more scholarly attention. Amartya Sen has written that Tagore ‘never criticized Gandhi personally’. This isn’t quite true. In a letter sent to his English missionary friend C. F. Andrews in July 1915, Tagore made the following and striking claim: ‘only a moral tyrant like Gandhi can think that he has the dreadful power to make his ideas prevail through the means of slavery’. When Andrews came to publish Tagore’s letter in his 1928 book Letters to a Friend he deleted Gandhi’s name and left only the generic ‘tyrant’. It suggests to us that in spite of Tagore’s obvious admiration for Gandhi; in spite of the fact that it was Tagore himself who first gave Gandhi the name mahatma – the ‘great soul’ – he held deep reservations about Gandhi’s methods. ‘It is absurd’, Tagore wrote ‘to think that you must create slaves to make your ideas free’. Tagore sometimes saw Gandhi’s willingness to enforce his beliefs as a form of violence. Tagore’s advocacy of the ‘worlding’ or opening out of a creative, expressive Indian self often clashed with Gandhi’s effort to negate external influence.""

The International Journal of the Humanities, 2007

Nations & Nationalism, 2011

Third World Protest is a book about the difficulties thrown up by the tension between a universal... more Third World Protest is a book about the difficulties thrown up by the tension between a universalist liberal international order that claims to know what is best for the rest of the world, and ‘Third World’ (the term is used advisedly and with justification by the author, see pp. 24-30) efforts at resistance, which claim to speak for the supposedly oppressed minority. Rao challenges his reader to question the ‘tacit alliance between a politically correct Western left, so ashamed of the crimes of Western imperialism that it found itself incapable of denouncing the actions of Third World regimes, and a hyper-defensive Third World mentality, exemplified by the nationalist historiography that suffused the pages of standard Indian history textbooks in which all the ills of the country were blamed on Western imperialism’.

The Journal of European Affairs, 2004

Has globalization forever undermined the state as the mighty guarantor of public welfare and secu... more Has globalization forever undermined the state as the mighty guarantor of public welfare and security? In the 1990s, the prevailing and even hopeful view was that it had. The euphoria did not last long. Today the “return of the state” is increasingly being discussed as a desirable reality. This book is the first to bring together a group of prominent scholars from comparative politics, international relations, and sociology to systematically reassess — through a historical lens that moves beyond the standard focus on the West — state-society relations and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The contributors examine the sources and forms of state power in light of a range of welfare and security needs in order to tell us what states can do today. They assess the extent to which international social forces affect states, and the capacity of states to adapt in specific issue areas. Their striking conclusion is that states have continued to be pivotal in diverse areas such as nationalism, national security, multiculturalism, taxation, and industrial relations. Offering rich insights on the changing contours of state power, The Nation-State in Question will be of interest to social scientists, students, and policymakers alike. John Hall’s introduction is followed by chapters by Peter Baldwin, John Campbell, Francesco Duina, Grzegorz Ekiert, Jeffrey Herbst, Christopher Hood, Anatoly Khazanov, Brendan O’Leary, T. V. Paul, Bernard Yack, Rudra Sil, and Minxin Pei. The conclusion is by John Ikenberry.

Wisden, 2024

SI-UK India, 2024

Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, 2023

Holding up a Mirror to Cricket, 2023

We offer a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments:

● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.

● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.

The Conversation, 2023

The Political Quarterly, 2023

The Political Quarterly, 2022

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2020

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect?, 2017

The Encyclopedia of Empire, 2016

Diplomacy & Statecraft, 2013

State and Society in South Asia: Themes of Assertion and Recognition, edited by C. Spiess & A. Fischer (New Delhi: Samskriti), Oct 2014

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2012

openDemocracy, Sep 14, 2011

The Statesman, Kolkata, May 7, 2011

Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Oct 2008

The International Journal of the Humanities, 2007

Nations & Nationalism, 2011

The Journal of European Affairs, 2004

Empire, Nationalism and the Postcolonial World, 2020

New version published by Routledge (Manohar) - priced at rs 995 "Rabindranath Tagore remains o... more New version published by Routledge (Manohar) - priced at rs 995

"Rabindranath Tagore remains one of India's greatest thinkers. Michael Collins' book brilliantly sets him in the context of his European contemporaries, indicating how he was both interpreted and mis-interpreted for the wider world." - Sir Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge, UK

"Michael Collins' fine research on the Indian poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore sheds intriguing new light on the making of his reputation in the West. The book casts the intimate history of understanding and (as often) misunderstanding between Tagore and some of his closest supporters into poignant relief, and reminds us of the powerful and revelatory effects of close historical investigation." - Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford, UK

"Works of scholarship can spread ripples, and I foresee a considerable ripple effect from Dr Collins' painstaking pursuit of unity amidst the often baffling contradictions of Tagore's discursive writings" William Radice, SOAS

By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book places the work of India’s greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography.

Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore’s ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore’s thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore’s complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore’s provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore’s death.

An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore’s sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective, it is a timely contribution in the wake of the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth in 2011.

By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book ... more By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book places the work of India’s greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography.