Basketball Empire

How France and its colonial connections spurred basketball’s global spread.

The National Basketball Association, founded over seventy-five years ago, is staging a twenty-first-century takeover. Watched in more than two hundred countries and territories worldwide, and with nearly one in three players born and trained overseas, basketball is much bigger than the United States. In this book, Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff shows how the sport’s global takeover would have been impossible without France, exploring its interactions with the United States and colonial legacies with francophone Africa and the Afro-Caribbean. She takes us back to basketball’s very beginnings to show how remnants of empire have shaped the game.

Featuring interviews with players, sports journalists, league directors, and past and present coaches, Basketball Empire uncovers the transatlantic networks and complex Franco-American relations that have nurtured a mutual exchange of culture, technical skills, and knowledge. These firsthand accounts, supported by media and government archives, show how sports diplomacy sowed the seeds of a basketball revolution and helped make the NBA a global cultural entity. Arguing that basketball is deeply indebted to France’s colonial history and close—albeit complicated—relationship with the United States, this book traces the creation of a cultural empire and shows how sports can build bridges between nations.

Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff is a lecturer on sports diplomacy at New York University, a research associate at SOAS University London, and the director of FranceandUS. She is the author of The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France 1958-2010.