A Nation Imagined

In June 1928, the West Indies played their first Test match against a strong and confident England. The venue was the celebrated Lord’s. It was a historic event best understood in terms of the decades it took to acquire first class recognition and international status. The team’s arrival at the Test gates of Lord’s, a generation before adult suffrage was the norm at home, was greeted in West Indian towns and villages as a moment of social liberation and a critical step in the journey to statehood. The cricket pioneers, furthermore, constituted the most powerful and only unifying symbol of the nation West Indians were just beginning to imagine. In an important way, then, this book is an account of a politically organised community seeking detachment from the colonial scaffold with all its intense desire and deep internal division. It sets out the seminal steps and stages of the journey. In addition, it provides an archive of the tour (thirty official matches including three Tests) in the form of Press reports and score sheets that transport the reader vividly to the scenes of that West Indies Beginning.