This book places sports in a global historical context in order to show how they influence world politics and the world economy (and vice versa), and explaining the influence of sports at certain moments in global politics and world economic developments. Viewing sports in relation to key elements of world history - capitalist growth, investment, and marketing, ideology and security, institutional integration, immigration, nationalism, civil and human rights, tensions between democracies and dictatorships, universalism and isolationism - the book explores the ways in which professional sports, like other cultural phenomena, shape, or at least factor into, international politics.