The English bourgeoisie appropriated working-class games as instruments of imperial class discipline

Evidence

The English ruling bourgeoisie, at first, had required a discipline for themselves, for their own raison d’être and reproduction. They found their instrument among the cultural goods produced by the working classes. What they extracted or embedded in athleticism were rules of class, moral values, and a utilitarian rationalism. What they shared in the social spectacle of the games became part of the cement that bonded the several social orders into an identical imperial mission—one that would include even those natives at the peripheries whose claims to an English identity would amount to a tragic mistake. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1259

Categorization

• XREF: James’s point about colonial natives claiming an English identity that proves a tragic mistake prefigures his own account of the Black radical tradition’s origins in colonial education.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a ruling class disciplines itself through cultural goods produced by subordinate classes, and that the ‘cement’ bonded to an imperial mission dooms peripheral natives, is dense and counterintuitive.