Beyond the boundary: locating a more adequate framework to study the global development of cricket outside the British Empire

Cricket’s global diffusion has traditionally been understood through the lens of British imperial legacy, with scholarship focusing primarily on former colonies that now constitute the Commonwealth cricketing world. The sport’s accelerating expansion into non-Commonwealth contexts, marked above all by its inclusion in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, exposes the limits of this predominantly post-colonial scholarship. Taking cricket in China as a theoretical challenge, this article critically reviews dominant approaches in cricket studies and argues that they remain constrained by either teleological assumptions or imperialist analytical categories. Drawing on figurational sociology as an analytical lens, the article proposes a three-dimensional framework for analysing cricket development beyond the British Empire, centred on institutional embedding, governance structures, and gender power relations. It further develops the concept of a post post-Westernization of cricket, characterized by leapfrog developmentand inverted gender relations. The article argues that cricket’s contemporary expansion beyond the Commonwealth is increasingly shaped by the game’s incorporation into sport mega events, its embedding within local institutional architectures, and the strategic prioritization of the women’s game.