Ever since Narendra Modi became prime minister in May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have loudly proclaimed their ambition to make our country a “Vishwa-Guru” – Teacher to the World. With every passing month, however, they seem ever further from realising this ambition. However, whatever our failures in international politics, in the sphere of international cricket India is now the most powerful actor. Whether its actions are always or even often to the benefit of cricket is another matter altogether.

Back in 2017, I spent a few months as part of a Supreme Court-appointed “Committee of Administrators” that sought – in the end unavailingly – to bring more accountability and transparency to the activities of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. I found BCCI officials consumed by the desire to bring all other cricketing boards to heel.

As a historian, this worried me, since I knew of how, in the past, the imperial arrogance of White nations had rarely worked to the advantage of the game itself. As I wrote in my 2022 book, The Commonwealth of Cricket: “I told my colleagues in the BCCI that English and Australian hegemony had often worked against the larger interests of cricket worldwide. But, I added, so would Indian domination. India, I argued, must not become to international cricket what the United States was to international politics; setting the rules, and disregarding otherwise fair international treaties when it did not suit them.”

These (alas totally neglected) warnings came back to me while reading Rod Lyall’s new book, The Club: Empire, Power and the Governance of World Cricket. The book begins with the story of the Imperial Cricket Conference, which was founded in 1909, the brainchild of the imperial mining magnate, Abe Bailey. In its first few decades, the Imperial Cricket Conference was dominated by England and the White dominions of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. These countries, and especially England, decided how the international game would be run, how new members would or would not be admitted, how tours and series were scheduled, how laws and regulations were framed.

Cricketing nations such as India, Pakistan, and the West Indies were treated with condescension and even contempt. They had absolutely no say in how........

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