Michael P Collins
Dr Michael Collins is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History. He joined UCL History as a probationary lecturer in 2007 and was awarded his PhD in History by the University of Oxford in 2009. He became a permanent member of UCL History staff in 2010 and was promoted to associate professor in 2016. He previously studied the history of political thought at Cambridge University and politics at the London School of Economics.In addition to his role in the Department of History,
From 2019-22, Michael was Vice Dean for Advancement in the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. In this capacity, he works with faculty colleagues on strategic planning for matters such as alumni relations, external engagement, philanthropic donations and equalities, diversity and inclusion. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Britain (CMCB) within UCL’s Institute of Advanced Study (IAS).
In June 2021, Michael was appointed to serve as a Commissioner on the Butts Commission, an ECB-funded commission into equity in cricket, focusing on inclusion and exclusion in terms of race, class and gender. The Commission reported in the summer of 2023.
Dr Collins is a historian of modern and contemporary Britain, primarily focusing on the period 1940-present. He currently has two main research themes:
1. The historical development of political ideas in post-war Britain.
This work focuses on how ideas are formed and deployed by ‘elites’ to respond to specific problems and challenges, for example, the decolonisation of the British Empire, Britain’s late-1950s orientation towards European political and economic integration, and the rise of identity politics within the United Kingdom.
2. The social and cultural history of migration and settlement in post-war Britain.
This research focuses more on the lived experience of migrants and settlers but connects to the ways in which these processes have challenged metropolitan racism and historically racialised understandings of national identity, thereby reconfiguring the meanings of Britishness and Englishness.
Dr Collins is finishing a book on the history of ‘Windrush Cricket’, which integrates these two research themes. The project looks at the way in which cricket formed an integral part of the Windrush generation’s efforts to settle and build communities in English cities after 1948. It also considers the way in which the English cricket ‘establishment’ reacted to the presence of black cricketers, including the children of Windrush migrants from the 1970s onwards, and what this can tell us about the cultural politics of Englishness.
Address: UCL History
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
From 2019-22, Michael was Vice Dean for Advancement in the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. In this capacity, he works with faculty colleagues on strategic planning for matters such as alumni relations, external engagement, philanthropic donations and equalities, diversity and inclusion. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Britain (CMCB) within UCL’s Institute of Advanced Study (IAS).
In June 2021, Michael was appointed to serve as a Commissioner on the Butts Commission, an ECB-funded commission into equity in cricket, focusing on inclusion and exclusion in terms of race, class and gender. The Commission reported in the summer of 2023.
Dr Collins is a historian of modern and contemporary Britain, primarily focusing on the period 1940-present. He currently has two main research themes:
1. The historical development of political ideas in post-war Britain.
This work focuses on how ideas are formed and deployed by ‘elites’ to respond to specific problems and challenges, for example, the decolonisation of the British Empire, Britain’s late-1950s orientation towards European political and economic integration, and the rise of identity politics within the United Kingdom.
2. The social and cultural history of migration and settlement in post-war Britain.
This research focuses more on the lived experience of migrants and settlers but connects to the ways in which these processes have challenged metropolitan racism and historically racialised understandings of national identity, thereby reconfiguring the meanings of Britishness and Englishness.
Dr Collins is finishing a book on the history of ‘Windrush Cricket’, which integrates these two research themes. The project looks at the way in which cricket formed an integral part of the Windrush generation’s efforts to settle and build communities in English cities after 1948. It also considers the way in which the English cricket ‘establishment’ reacted to the presence of black cricketers, including the children of Windrush migrants from the 1970s onwards, and what this can tell us about the cultural politics of Englishness.
Address: UCL History
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
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Papers by Michael P Collins
The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, published in June 2023, was unequivocal that "deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism continue to exist across the game". Our report, as made explicit in its opening pages, was not just about racism. Equally important, we wrote, cricket is marked by "structural and institutional sexism and class-based discrimination". In addition to entrenched racism, our report found that women cricketers and staff are marginalised, and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. We also found, unsurprisingly, that class prejudice is extensive, that the dominance of private schools constitutes a deep divide-in terms of cricket's culture and its resources-and that this schism underpins cricket's talent pathway, determining who gets to progress through it, and ultimately represent their country.
Furthermore, when looking beyond England, to the fact that cricket is now a global game played by a very diverse range of people, we perhaps too easily trade on the notion that ‘cricket brings people together’. The ‘Spirit of Cricket’ set out in the preamble to the laws of the game states that cricket “brings together people from different nationalities, cultures and religions.” Whilst undoubtedly true - cricket is a shared heritage and shared language that crosses boundaries of nation, religion and ethnicity - it is also too simplistic.
By way of example consider the Barbados Cricket Buckle, an engraved belt buckle from the 1780s that depicts a slave, unmistakably in bondage, with bat in hand, in front of a set of stumps. It was found in a riverbed in the north of England in the 1970s. How it got there is unknown, but the artefact reminds us - despite the overwhelming emphasis in public discourse still being on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 - of Britain’s long history as one of the world’s biggest slave empires. It is also a striking depiction of how cricket was passed on and adopted often in the most unequal of contexts. Cricket ‘bringing people together’ takes on a different meaning when looked at from this perspective.
As such, we believe that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity, and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression.
Struggles have been waged between the rural and the urban; social classes; ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’; north and south; private and state educated; men and women; and, perhaps most starkly of all, between White colonisers and ‘non-White’ peoples, dating from the age of the British slave trade and imperialism but resonating far beyond, into the postcolonial age.
Most often, these conflicts have revolved around questions of power and control by an elite group. In this respect, cricket has often operated on the basis of barriers to access, and historically-excluded groups have been forced to go to extraordinary lengths to gain admittance to the privileged spaces of the playing field, the club, the dressing room, and the management committee. Importantly, these problems are far from being isolated in a distant past. Stereotypes about ‘racial characteristics’, the ‘proper’ role of men and women in the game, as well as tropes about class and regional differences have all been handed down over the generations.
We believe that it is vital for the game to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant of the ways in which both its past and present are imbued with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions.
We approach this task in the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, who famously prefaced his treatise on Caribbean cricket and colonialism – Beyond a Boundary (1963) – by asking “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” In other words, if we are to understand the nature and extent of (in)equity in cricket, our sense of what cricket history is must go beyond ‘the game’: dates, scorecards, names and numbers. Developing a better sense of cricket history reveals many of the unspoken assumptions, inherited from the past, that have enabled particular groups of people to dominate the game in terms of power and access to resources, whilst others have remained at the margins. It can also help everyone in the game gain a better understanding of where contemporary injustices have come from.
We offer a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments:
● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.
● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.
● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.
After the second world war, racism forced many new Windrush arrivals – predominantly black Caribbean men looking for employment in manual jobs – to set up their own cricket clubs.
Despite all this, and compared to his contemporaries Gandhi and Nehru, relatively few people have heard of Rabindranath Tagore. A Titan of the Bengal Renaissance, Tagore was cast in Romantic mould by a briefly admiring modernist intelligentsia in England. In India he was feted but also castigated for supposedly betraying the nationalist Left. Much maligned and often misunderstood, recovering Tagore’s thought and life in all its complexity is important today – as the twenty-first century eclipse of the West by the East unfolds – for the fact that he tried to imagine and articulate an alternative modernity: not a Eurocentric one but a parallel Indian or ‘Eastern’ modernity that would necessarily involve inter-cultural dialogue and convergence. Tagore would have passionately opposed the post-9/11 ‘clash of civilisations’ argument."
Rather than genuine dialogue and mutual learning, Yeats was more interested in instrumentalising Tagore – and the East more generally – as part of a project of European cultural recovery. Tagore functioned not as an independent thinker or agent of historical change in his own right, but as something of an aesthetic object. And when that object of fascination developed a voice beyond the pretty emotions of Gitanjali; when Tagore sought to lecture, educate and sometimes denounce the West in English, or to deepen the West’s understanding of Indian philosophy, his audience of admirers soon changed their mind. ‘Damn Tagore’, Yeats wrote in 1935, ‘he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English’. The early green shoots of cross-cultural growth did not last even into the summer of 1913 when Pound decided that Tagore’s philosophy had little to offer anyone who had ‘felt the pangs’ and been ‘pestered with Western civilisation’. Yeats soon distanced himself from Tagore, and whilst his encounters with Indian philosophy and religious thought outlasted the Tagore moment, he found it difficult to move beyond the gauche problematic posed by Pound: ‘Why should India’, Yeats asked in the 1930s, ‘be always thinking of peace – shanti? Life is a conflict’.
Both Tagore and Gandhi agreed that there was to be nothing passive about resistance, but Tagore could not tolerate the negativity of book burning or education boycotts, which he saw as an offence against a higher ideal of cooperation. The differences between Tagore and Gandhi have been over-stated at times, but differences there were and their debates through the 1920s and 1930s about the nature of freedom deserve much more scholarly attention. Amartya Sen has written that Tagore ‘never criticized Gandhi personally’. This isn’t quite true. In a letter sent to his English missionary friend C. F. Andrews in July 1915, Tagore made the following and striking claim: ‘only a moral tyrant like Gandhi can think that he has the dreadful power to make his ideas prevail through the means of slavery’. When Andrews came to publish Tagore’s letter in his 1928 book Letters to a Friend he deleted Gandhi’s name and left only the generic ‘tyrant’. It suggests to us that in spite of Tagore’s obvious admiration for Gandhi; in spite of the fact that it was Tagore himself who first gave Gandhi the name mahatma – the ‘great soul’ – he held deep reservations about Gandhi’s methods. ‘It is absurd’, Tagore wrote ‘to think that you must create slaves to make your ideas free’. Tagore sometimes saw Gandhi’s willingness to enforce his beliefs as a form of violence. Tagore’s advocacy of the ‘worlding’ or opening out of a creative, expressive Indian self often clashed with Gandhi’s effort to negate external influence.""
The contributors examine the sources and forms of state power in light of a range of welfare and security needs in order to tell us what states can do today. They assess the extent to which international social forces affect states, and the capacity of states to adapt in specific issue areas. Their striking conclusion is that states have continued to be pivotal in diverse areas such as nationalism, national security, multiculturalism, taxation, and industrial relations. Offering rich insights on the changing contours of state power, The Nation-State in Question will be of interest to social scientists, students, and policymakers alike. John Hall’s introduction is followed by chapters by Peter Baldwin, John Campbell, Francesco Duina, Grzegorz Ekiert, Jeffrey Herbst, Christopher Hood, Anatoly Khazanov, Brendan O’Leary, T. V. Paul, Bernard Yack, Rudra Sil, and Minxin Pei. The conclusion is by John Ikenberry.
The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, published in June 2023, was unequivocal that "deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism continue to exist across the game". Our report, as made explicit in its opening pages, was not just about racism. Equally important, we wrote, cricket is marked by "structural and institutional sexism and class-based discrimination". In addition to entrenched racism, our report found that women cricketers and staff are marginalised, and routinely experience sexism and misogyny. We also found, unsurprisingly, that class prejudice is extensive, that the dominance of private schools constitutes a deep divide-in terms of cricket's culture and its resources-and that this schism underpins cricket's talent pathway, determining who gets to progress through it, and ultimately represent their country.
Furthermore, when looking beyond England, to the fact that cricket is now a global game played by a very diverse range of people, we perhaps too easily trade on the notion that ‘cricket brings people together’. The ‘Spirit of Cricket’ set out in the preamble to the laws of the game states that cricket “brings together people from different nationalities, cultures and religions.” Whilst undoubtedly true - cricket is a shared heritage and shared language that crosses boundaries of nation, religion and ethnicity - it is also too simplistic.
By way of example consider the Barbados Cricket Buckle, an engraved belt buckle from the 1780s that depicts a slave, unmistakably in bondage, with bat in hand, in front of a set of stumps. It was found in a riverbed in the north of England in the 1970s. How it got there is unknown, but the artefact reminds us - despite the overwhelming emphasis in public discourse still being on the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 - of Britain’s long history as one of the world’s biggest slave empires. It is also a striking depiction of how cricket was passed on and adopted often in the most unequal of contexts. Cricket ‘bringing people together’ takes on a different meaning when looked at from this perspective.
As such, we believe that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity, and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression.
Struggles have been waged between the rural and the urban; social classes; ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’; north and south; private and state educated; men and women; and, perhaps most starkly of all, between White colonisers and ‘non-White’ peoples, dating from the age of the British slave trade and imperialism but resonating far beyond, into the postcolonial age.
Most often, these conflicts have revolved around questions of power and control by an elite group. In this respect, cricket has often operated on the basis of barriers to access, and historically-excluded groups have been forced to go to extraordinary lengths to gain admittance to the privileged spaces of the playing field, the club, the dressing room, and the management committee. Importantly, these problems are far from being isolated in a distant past. Stereotypes about ‘racial characteristics’, the ‘proper’ role of men and women in the game, as well as tropes about class and regional differences have all been handed down over the generations.
We believe that it is vital for the game to develop a more critical and self-aware approach, to be more cognisant of the ways in which both its past and present are imbued with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions.
We approach this task in the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, who famously prefaced his treatise on Caribbean cricket and colonialism – Beyond a Boundary (1963) – by asking “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” In other words, if we are to understand the nature and extent of (in)equity in cricket, our sense of what cricket history is must go beyond ‘the game’: dates, scorecards, names and numbers. Developing a better sense of cricket history reveals many of the unspoken assumptions, inherited from the past, that have enabled particular groups of people to dominate the game in terms of power and access to resources, whilst others have remained at the margins. It can also help everyone in the game gain a better understanding of where contemporary injustices have come from.
We offer a historical context for the key themes that underpin the Commission’s Terms of Reference, and in doing so develop three central arguments:
● Cricket has not simply ‘reflected’ conflicts in wider society, it has frequently been central to fostering or reproducing those conflicts.
● Typically, elite social groups have commanded most of the power and control within cricket, and have resisted change.
● Although cricket has a long history, the period after about 1860 up to World War I was pivotal in terms of establishing the idea that cricket exemplified a specific version of Englishness – White, middle to upper class, profoundly male-dominated – with this image exported throughout Britain’s empire.
After the second world war, racism forced many new Windrush arrivals – predominantly black Caribbean men looking for employment in manual jobs – to set up their own cricket clubs.
Despite all this, and compared to his contemporaries Gandhi and Nehru, relatively few people have heard of Rabindranath Tagore. A Titan of the Bengal Renaissance, Tagore was cast in Romantic mould by a briefly admiring modernist intelligentsia in England. In India he was feted but also castigated for supposedly betraying the nationalist Left. Much maligned and often misunderstood, recovering Tagore’s thought and life in all its complexity is important today – as the twenty-first century eclipse of the West by the East unfolds – for the fact that he tried to imagine and articulate an alternative modernity: not a Eurocentric one but a parallel Indian or ‘Eastern’ modernity that would necessarily involve inter-cultural dialogue and convergence. Tagore would have passionately opposed the post-9/11 ‘clash of civilisations’ argument."
Rather than genuine dialogue and mutual learning, Yeats was more interested in instrumentalising Tagore – and the East more generally – as part of a project of European cultural recovery. Tagore functioned not as an independent thinker or agent of historical change in his own right, but as something of an aesthetic object. And when that object of fascination developed a voice beyond the pretty emotions of Gitanjali; when Tagore sought to lecture, educate and sometimes denounce the West in English, or to deepen the West’s understanding of Indian philosophy, his audience of admirers soon changed their mind. ‘Damn Tagore’, Yeats wrote in 1935, ‘he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English’. The early green shoots of cross-cultural growth did not last even into the summer of 1913 when Pound decided that Tagore’s philosophy had little to offer anyone who had ‘felt the pangs’ and been ‘pestered with Western civilisation’. Yeats soon distanced himself from Tagore, and whilst his encounters with Indian philosophy and religious thought outlasted the Tagore moment, he found it difficult to move beyond the gauche problematic posed by Pound: ‘Why should India’, Yeats asked in the 1930s, ‘be always thinking of peace – shanti? Life is a conflict’.
Both Tagore and Gandhi agreed that there was to be nothing passive about resistance, but Tagore could not tolerate the negativity of book burning or education boycotts, which he saw as an offence against a higher ideal of cooperation. The differences between Tagore and Gandhi have been over-stated at times, but differences there were and their debates through the 1920s and 1930s about the nature of freedom deserve much more scholarly attention. Amartya Sen has written that Tagore ‘never criticized Gandhi personally’. This isn’t quite true. In a letter sent to his English missionary friend C. F. Andrews in July 1915, Tagore made the following and striking claim: ‘only a moral tyrant like Gandhi can think that he has the dreadful power to make his ideas prevail through the means of slavery’. When Andrews came to publish Tagore’s letter in his 1928 book Letters to a Friend he deleted Gandhi’s name and left only the generic ‘tyrant’. It suggests to us that in spite of Tagore’s obvious admiration for Gandhi; in spite of the fact that it was Tagore himself who first gave Gandhi the name mahatma – the ‘great soul’ – he held deep reservations about Gandhi’s methods. ‘It is absurd’, Tagore wrote ‘to think that you must create slaves to make your ideas free’. Tagore sometimes saw Gandhi’s willingness to enforce his beliefs as a form of violence. Tagore’s advocacy of the ‘worlding’ or opening out of a creative, expressive Indian self often clashed with Gandhi’s effort to negate external influence.""
The contributors examine the sources and forms of state power in light of a range of welfare and security needs in order to tell us what states can do today. They assess the extent to which international social forces affect states, and the capacity of states to adapt in specific issue areas. Their striking conclusion is that states have continued to be pivotal in diverse areas such as nationalism, national security, multiculturalism, taxation, and industrial relations. Offering rich insights on the changing contours of state power, The Nation-State in Question will be of interest to social scientists, students, and policymakers alike. John Hall’s introduction is followed by chapters by Peter Baldwin, John Campbell, Francesco Duina, Grzegorz Ekiert, Jeffrey Herbst, Christopher Hood, Anatoly Khazanov, Brendan O’Leary, T. V. Paul, Bernard Yack, Rudra Sil, and Minxin Pei. The conclusion is by John Ikenberry.
"Rabindranath Tagore remains one of India's greatest thinkers. Michael Collins' book brilliantly sets him in the context of his European contemporaries, indicating how he was both interpreted and mis-interpreted for the wider world." - Sir Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge, UK
"Michael Collins' fine research on the Indian poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore sheds intriguing new light on the making of his reputation in the West. The book casts the intimate history of understanding and (as often) misunderstanding between Tagore and some of his closest supporters into poignant relief, and reminds us of the powerful and revelatory effects of close historical investigation." - Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford, UK
"Works of scholarship can spread ripples, and I foresee a considerable ripple effect from Dr Collins' painstaking pursuit of unity amidst the often baffling contradictions of Tagore's discursive writings" William Radice, SOAS
By presenting a new interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s English language writings, this book places the work of India’s greatest Nobel Prize winner and cultural icon in the context of imperial history and thereby bridges the gap between Tagore studies and imperial/postcolonial historiography.
Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore’s ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore’s thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore’s complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore’s provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore’s death.
An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore’s sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective, it is a timely contribution in the wake of the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth in 2011.
Using detailed archival research, the book charts the origins of Tagore’s ideas in Indian religious traditions and discusses the impact of early Indian nationalism on Tagore’s thinking. It offers a new interpretation of Tagore’s complex debates with Gandhi about the colonial encounter, Tagore’s provocative analysis of the impact of British imperialism in India and his questioning of nationalism as a pathway to authentic postcolonial freedom. The book also demonstrates how the man and his ideas were received and interpreted in Britain during his lifetime and how they have been sometimes misrepresented by nationalist historians and postcolonial theorists after Tagore’s death.
An alternative interpretation based on an intellectual history approach, this book places Tagore’s sense of agency, his ideas and intentions within a broader historical framework. Offering an exciting critique of postcolonial theory from a historical perspective.