By TOM HOLLAND

The American series "30 Rock" has been airing in the U.K. for several years now, and most of it carries perfectly well across the pond. But comedy depends on context, and I was surely not alone among my countrymen in raising an eyebrow at one plot twist. Jack Donaghy, the fictional head of NBC (played by Alec Baldwin), decided to run the network into the ground and, to that end, scheduled a series of shows guaranteed to shed viewers. His great triumph was a concept so brilliantly appalling that its very title seemed oxymoronic: "Cricket Night in America."

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The Indian Premier League has shorter matches, colorful uniforms and even cheerleaders.

Like warm beer and crooked teeth, cricket is one of those aspects of English life that even the most Anglophile of Americans tend to find perplexing. It seems better suited to C-Span than a sports channel. Its rules are arcane, its rhythms stately, and matches can go on for days. This weekend, the season begins, almost apologetically, with a match between Essex (England's equivalent of New Jersey) and Cambridge University. Nothing is riding on it, nobody will watch it and it will almost certainly be rained out. The equivalent of baseball's Opening Day it is not.

But American sports fans should not be too quick to mock. Had history turned out differently, they might well be looking forward to the new cricket season themselves. Far from being damaged by its association with England, the sport flourished along the East Coast for decades after independence. The first international cricket match, played in 1844, saw the U.S. take on Canada in New York. Only during the Civil War did baseball decisively overtake it in popularity. The fading of the sport in America was very much cricket's loss.

Elsewhere, though, cricket flourished. Today it may not be a global sport on the scale of soccer, but it is considerably more global than baseball. It is played on the beaches of Barbados and the maidans of India, in the suburbs of Sydney and the refugee camps of Peshawar.

What links these wildly varied places is that all of them once belonged to the British Empire. When much of the world map was painted British red, cricket served as a key expression of imperial values. It flattered the British to imagine their empire as the geopolitical equivalent of playing a straight bat. Their colonial subjects, confronted by this conviction, might have been expected to end up thoroughly loathing the sport. Instead, they did something altogether more subversive: They made it their own. "Cricket," as the cultural theorist Ashis Nandy wittily put it, "is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English."

This complex history means that the sport has always been much more than a sport. Cricket has a venerable tradition of triggering international crises. During one series in the early 1930s, the tactics deployed by the English captain caused so much mayhem on the pitch that Australia almost left the British Commonwealth in protest. In 1968, England's selection of a cricketer classified by the South African authorities as "Cape Colored" to tour their country provoked a row so bitter that it ushered in the sporting boycott of apartheid.

Today, it is the starring role enjoyed by cricket in the subcontinent that enables it, better perhaps than any other sport, to prove the truth of Orwell's mordant dictum that sport is "war minus the shooting." Whenever the superstars of India and Pakistan meet at the wicket, they know that they are proxies for two bitter rivals armed with nuclear weapons. Not even the Yankees and Red Sox can say as much.

There can be no doubt where the balance of power currently lies. The mounting instability in Pakistan has had a wretched impact on the country's cricketing fortunes. In 2009, in the first attack on a national sports team since the 1972 Munich Olympics, terrorists in Lahore opened fire on the Sri Lankan team bus. Six cricketers were injured, and several policemen and bystanders killed. Pakistan, unsurprisingly, has not hosted an international match since.

Meanwhile, in India, cricketers are the public face of a booming soon-to-be superpower. Their principal showcase is the Indian Premier League, a swaggering, cocksure tournament in which the world's best players play a severely truncated form of the game called 20/20. This is a form of cricket that Americans might almost recognize: There are colored uniforms, gyrating cheerleaders and a massive sponsorship deal with Pepsi. The sheer amount of money sloshing around the IPL means that in sports, as in regional politics, India can now throw its weight around pretty much as it likes.

The revving up of the IPL juggernaut has caused palpitations in England. Just as Western governments fret about the rise of China and India, so the traditional cricketing powers of England and Australia worry about the ebbing of their influence. For 141 years, the two countries have played each other for one of sport's oldest trophies, the "Ashes," and this summer the rivalry is renewed.

The Ashes is everything that the IPL is not. The matches, called Tests, last five days rather than one evening, the cricketers wear traditional whites and cheerleaders are notable by their absence.

Most cricketers and cricket fans know that Test matches are the supreme form of the game, which gives rise to anxieties that 20/20 might replace Test cricket in the affections of the viewing public. In this panic over the fate of the game, there is an almost moral quality.

A cheerier prognosis is that cricket is simply doing what it has often done in the past (and which all sports must do to stay alive): evolving in response to changing times. There is no need to cast the Ashes and the IPL as rivals in a zero-sum game. Both have fanatical followings; both can thrive. No other team sport has deeper historical roots, just as no other team sport has responded to the shifting of global power from the West to the East with such a flourish of innovation.

It is this tension within cricket that makes its future so compelling—even for those with no idea what a cover drive or googly might be. Who knows, maybe Jack Donaghy was onto something after all?

—Mr. Holland is a British historian and an enthusiastic amateur cricketer.