Stefan Huebner's Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia is indispensable for any scholar with even a passing interest in the history of sport in Asia. It is also of value beyond that still growing field: Huebner clearly frames his work in an analysis of the implicit civilizing missions of the modern West in Asia and the projects of Asian elites that succeeded them, engaging with larger questions of intersections between Asian and Western formulations of modern society. He chooses, as scholars writing in sports history must often do, to contextualize his approach in a more established field of ideas. We end up with a mixture of James Scott's authoritarian high modernism; Anthony D. Smith's ethno-symbolism; and the concept of “nation-branding,” through which sporting events came to produce teleological narratives of future greatness. This framing is perfectly acceptable—Huebner notes critiques of Scott and skillfully adapts Smith—but perhaps adds more...
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