The first of its kind for any sport in South Africa. A cricket love story of epic dimensions with details which will blow readers away. Cricket and Conquest goes back to the beginnings 221 years ago and fundamentally revises long-established foundational narratives of early South African cricket. It reaches beyond old whites-only mainstream histories to integrate at every stage and in every region the experiences of black and women cricketers. A purely British military game at first, cricket accompanied the process of colonial conquest every step of the way in the nineteenth century. This book and its companion volumes explains how racism came to be built into the very fabric of cricket's `culture' and `traditions', and how it was uncannily tied to the broader historical processes that shaped South Africa. The unique experiences of our different cricket communities are described in ways that have not been done before. The exhaustive research and inter-connections highlighted here makes this a completely new general history of South African cricket.