James read Greek Olympic games as a model of imperial hegemony over Britain’s masses

Evidence

For James, the starting point for understanding the English ruling classes and their hegemony over the laboring classes at home and abroad was in the historical parallel he discovered between ancient Greece and nineteenthand twentieth-century Imperial Britain. It was a natural place for him to begin, he was British and “Greco-Roman we are.” In both societies, he recognized a relationship that fused power and organized games; an almost fanatical obsession with athletics, cemented (as he wrote of the Greeks) to the assertion of “the national unity of Greek civilization and the consciousness of themselves as separate from the barbarians who surrounded them.” … The first recorded date in European history is 776 B.C., the date of the first Olympic Games. The Greek states made unceasing war against one another. But when the four-yearly games approached they declared a national truce, the various competitors assembled at Olympia, the games were held and when these were over the wars began again… . To every Greek city and every colony (as far away as Italy, Sicily, Africa, Egypt and Marseilles) the envoys went from Olympia with the invitations, and the communities sent their representatives and their official deputations. Forty thousand pilgrims would assemble, including the most distinguished members of Greek society. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1249

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes James’s signature method of reading games/culture as fused with imperial power — a core lens for his understanding of modern Black radicalism’s shadow, the British hegemony it opposed.