1865 With the publication of a book called Researches into the His-
tory of Early Mankind,the English anthropologist Edward B.
Tylor becomes the first important prophet of cultural diffusion.
Tylor’s premise is that ideas are only invented once, and that
cultures grow by borrowing these ideas from one another.
These ideas have subsequently been applied to the martial arts.
Europeans, for instance, have often insisted that Greeks or Ro-
mans were the source of some particular invention, while the
Chinese and Indians argued about whether Bodhidharma was
the inventor.
1867 Under the patronage of John Sholto Douglas, the eccentric
eighth Marquis of Queensberry, new rules are developed for
amateur boxing. The new rules helped pugilism recover its lost
popularity, as they reduced the visible injuries and subjected
fighters to the constraints of the clock, something important to
workingmen who needed to catch the last train home.
1871 Japan’s first modern police force is formed, the organizer and
first chief a former Satsuma samurai named Kawaji Toshiyoshi.
(About two-thirds of early Tokyo police were former Satsuma
samurai.) A trained swordsman of the Chiba school, Kawaji
believed that martial arts training developed superior police-
men. Many Japanese agreed with him, and to this day training
in kendô, jûdô, and jodô(singlestick) continues to play an im-
portant role in Japanese police training.
1875 The Russian mystic Helene Blavatsky and the American lawyer
Henry Olcott establish the Theosophical Society in New York
and London. Although Blavatsky was something of a charlatan
and Olcott important mainly for supporting Sri Lankan Bud-
dhism during a time of profound Christian oppression, together
they were among the first Europeans or Americans to systemat-
ically mine Vedic and Buddhist philosophies for religious
truths.
1876 Inspired by the success of the YMCA at providing urban youth
with an attractive alternative to saloons, the Wilson Mission es-
tablishes the Boys Club of the City of New York; to attract
Catholic and Jewish youths, the club keeps active Protestant
proselytizing. Sponsors, including railroad baron E. H. Harri-
man, supported such organizations because they were believed
to reduce street crime.
1879 An Anglo-Irish philologist named John Mahaffy invents the
myth of ancient Greek amateur sports. The invention was de-
signed to keep white-collar workers and their children from
having to compete against working-class workers and their
children. Mahaffy also invented the idea of the intrinsic pleas-
ure of sport for its own sake, again as a way of preventing
working-class athletes from competing with middle- and upper-
class athletes. In fairness to Mahaffy, he was a man of his
times, and his ideas were an outgrowth of late Victorian philos-
ophy rather than eccentric bigotry.
1880 To encourage newspaper sales (the more controversial or antici-
pated the bouts, the more papers sold), Richard Kyle Fox’s Na-
tional Police Gazettebegins ranking boxers.
Chronological History of the Martial Arts 821