| Hosts: Birmingham Dates: 28 July to 8 August |
| Coverage: Watch live on BBC TV with extra streams on BBC iPlayer, Red Button, BBC Sport website and BBC Sport mobile app. |
This summer cricket is part of the Commonwealth Games. For the first time, eight women’s teams from around the world will compete for the gold medal.
But cricket has always been part of the Commonwealth, or to give it another name, the Empire.
Like no other sport, cricket reflects and reveals the legacy of that part of British history.
“If you’re a batter, and you’re out, you don’t question the verdict of the umpire,” says Dr Prashant Kidambi of Leicester University, an expert in Indian colonial history.
“That’s a very good way of thinking of the relationship, as the British saw it, between the colonisers and the colonised.”
Kidambi’s book Cricket Country examines the origins of the game there, especially in modern Mumbai where Lord Harris was the British governor in the 1890s.
“As the Empire grew, and cricket began to be…
