People have been playing bat and ball games for millennia, just as they have been kicking round objects like pig bladders between two posts long before anyone used the word 'soccer'. The fact that large parts of the world has come to agree on exactly how to play those games is less down to the discovery of a particularly popular set of rules than to the processes of imperialism, power, global influence and education.

'Americanisation' - or 'Americanization', I suppose - is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to the imperialist projects of Western European powers which exported recreational games to the four corners of their Empires, including to the Unites States. 'Soccer' is of course English association football; with roots in the ancient folk games of England's medieval towns, football was standardised in the mid-nineteenth century in the great public schools of Eton and Harrow, and eventually codified in the 1848 Cambridge Rules at Trinity College. These rules were imported to the schools which the British Empire and its missionaries established throughout the colonies, and therefore the local elites who came to rule those nations were inculcated with the love of 'the beautiful game' the way the English played it. Games were, according to British educationalists, a character-building exercise which involved the Victorian virtues of hard work and fair play, and therefore a worthy endeavour on par with academic pursuits. According to legend, a frustrated student picked up a football and ran with it during a school football match in 1823, and he named the new game which his actions inspired after his school - Rugby. What Americans call 'football' was developed at Yale and Harvard by students who played Rugby and Football, as those universities strove to model themselves on the example set by Oxford and Cambridge and followed them in promoting the old sporting virtues through increasingly sophisticated games.

Baseball, of course, had long been played by English schoolchildren in the form of rounders or stoolball, and its cousin is the greatest of all English sports - Cricket. Unlike baseball, cricket is enjoyed in vast parts of the world, particularly India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia and the 'West Indies'. These, of course, were the places where the rules of cricket were imported wholesale from the English village green to the Bay of Cambay, where it was taught to local by East India Company sailors in the early 18th century.

Whilst the U.S. has since become the global hegemon, it arguably only solidified that position after 1945, and even then has not engaged in the direct establishment of schools, governments and population transfer through which its sporting traditions could be imposed on colonial subjects. Where it has exercised the most direct cultural influence, for instance in Japan, the Philippines, Nicaragua or South Korea - baseball is very popular. Elsewhere, we stick to the bat-and-ball games which we have always played.