Books by Philip Dine

As France's oldest team sport, rugby football has throughout its 125-year history reflected major changes in French society. This book analyzes the complex variety of motives which have led the French to adopt and remake this unlikely British sport in their own image.

How does sport shape society? This book seeks to answer this question by examining the meaning of sport in French society and the construction of local, national and, increasingly, global identities through sport. It begins by reassessing modern sport's emergence and consolidation in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.