Prizefighter

The globetrotting champion of the oppressed who shook his fist at the world in an era of profound change

Prizefighter is the extraordinary saga of James “Yankee” Sullivan, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, traveled the globe as a refugee, convict, laborer, and pugilist—and helped bring our modern world into being. Sullivan was born as Francis Ambrose in Ireland in 1813, ventured to London as a boy, was arrested for thieving and shipped to Australia (where he learned to box), escaped from New Zealand on a whaler, won his first match out of Liverpool, reigned as a prizefighter and leading political figure in New York City in the 1840s, moved to Gold Rush California, coached the king of Hawaii in boxing, and spent his last days in a jail cell in San Francisco in 1856. But Sullivan’s life story is much more than a tale of adventure. He helped tie together a world being redefined by free trade, mass migration, industrialization, and democracy, becoming both a champion in the ring and a champion of the people. In this first era of globalization, as the life of Yankee Sullivan attests, prizefighters were world-makers.