Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book provides the first sustained historical analysis of migrant and minority participation in British boxing from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Drawing on a wide range of archival, press, autobiographical, and organisational materials, it reveals how individuals positioned as outsiders—fighters, managers, promoters, entrepreneurs, and spectators—were fundamental to the sport’s evolution, culture, and commercial practices, even as their contributions were routinely obscured. Although British boxing has long been framed as open, meritocratic, and ostensibly ‘colour-blind’, the study exposes a long-standing contradiction: the sport depended heavily on the labour and innovation of migrant and minority insiders whilst simultaneously marginalising, exploiting, and discriminating against them. Through detailed case studies and thematic examination, the book shows that the purported integrative, identity-shaping, and economic possibilities of boxing were often tightly circumscribed by the sport’s commercial logics and cultural contexts, as well as by wider societal attitudes. At the same time, boxing served as a key site in which racialised exclusion was produced, enacted, and normalised. The book positions British boxing as a vital lens through which to understand multiculturalism, inequality, and minority experience in modern Britain.</jats:p>