At the Bicycle Races: Global Sporting Culture and National Belonging at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, 1899-1913

In this article, the authors take three different points within a trans-Atlantic triangle to trace the flow of people, products, and ideas concerned with the sporting culture of the bicycle. We follow the emergence and elaboration of a global culture, casting light on how cycling was experienced across and between spaces, and challenges notions of coherent “nationality and territoriality” in the crucial decade before World War I. We utilize co-authorship as a means of overcoming the parochialism and a certain methodological nationalism that has constrained the history of technology, sport, and mobility. In doing so, the authors respond to the need for historians to pay closer attention to the transnational movements, flows, and circulations that have informed the development of national sporting contexts.