How Rounders Goes around the World Sumei Wang and Elizabeth  Shove By most accounts the English game of rounders travelled to the USA where it was transformed into baseball and played so widely during the American Civil War that it became what was, by the 1870s, referred to as America’s national game. Baseball, which is now extremely popular in Canada, Central and South America, and in many Asian countries, is currently cited as the ‘national’ game not only in the USA, 1 but also in Dominica, 2 Japan, 3 and Taiwan (see Figure 36.1). 4 We use this intriguing case of simultaneous internationalization and national appropriation to compare ways of conceptualizing the global difu- sion of practice. One dominant interpretation is that baseball, and other forms of organized sport, such as cricket, have been simply carried from one country to another oten by colonizing powers—and it is true, trajectories frequently follow this pattern. Having crossed the Atlantic and become established as a distinct entity, baseball was exported to Japan in the 1850s by American soldiers and teachers, and especially by those based in coastal ports where extraterrito- rial authority was granted. 5 Within a few decades, and partly in keeping with the Westernizing ambitions of the Meiji restoration, baseball was established across the Japanese state school system. When Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895, the Japanese took baseball with them, again introducing it into schools but this time as part of a deliberate project of assimilation, and as a means of ‘civilizing’ the native ‘barbarians’. 6 Baseball has not been unscathed by these movements from the UK to the USA, from the USA to Japan, or from Japan to Taiwan. 36 1 Frederick Ivor-Campbell, ‘Many Fathers of Baseball: Anglo-Americans and the Early Game’, in he American Game: Baseball and Ethnicities, ed. Lawrence Baldassaro and Richard A. Johnson (Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUniversity Press, 2002). 2 A. Klein, ‘Yo Soy Dominicano: Hegemony and Resistance through Baseball’, Sport in Society 10, 6 (2007): 916–46. 3 Donald Roden, ‘Baseball and the Quest for National Identity in Meiji Japan’, American Historical Review 85, 3 (June 1980): 511–34. 4 S.-Y. Hsieh and C.-F. Hsieh, Taiwanese Baseball Since 1906 (Taipei: Fruition Publishing, 2003); Junwei Yu and Dan Gordon, ‘Nationalism and National Identity in Taiwanese Baseball’, NINE 14, 2 (Spring 2006): 27–39. 5 Roden, ‘Baseball and the Quest for National Identity in Meiji Japan’. 6 Yu and Gordon, ‘Nationalism and National Identity in Taiwanese Baseball’. acprof_9780199212620.indd 202 acprof_9780199212620.indd 202 2/8/2014 3:29:17 AM 2/8/2014 3:29:17 AM