International cricket tours of Great Britain

International cricket tours of Great Britain began in 1868 when a team of Australian Aboriginals visited. In 1878, the first tour by the full Australian team took place. Tours up to the First World War tended to occur every two or three seasons with Australia at that time the most frequent visitor. As Test cricket expanded, the number of tours increased till, by the start of the Second World War, there was one visiting team playing Test cricket against England every season.

The last time that a domestic season featured no Test cricket, apart from wartime, was in 1927 when, although New Zealand visited, they had not yet begun to play Tests. A technical exception to this statement is 1970 when a scheduled tour by South Africa was cancelled and replaced by a Rest of the World XI who played a series of what are now unofficial Tests against England. In recent years, there has been a tendency for two teams to visit in the same season and less of a tendency to actually "tour" the country as the number of matches played by tourists against the county sides has been drastically reduced in the interests of staging more Limited Overs Internationals.