“Poverty,” which has long plagued South Africa, has attracted many detailed studies, but the only historical overview since John Iliffe’s The African Poor: A History (Cambridge University Press, 1987) is Colin Bundy’s “pocket book,” Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present (Jacana, 2016). Grace Davie’s new book, based on her 2005 University of Michigan Ph.D. dissertation, helps to fill this gap through a study not of “poverty” itself, but of what Alice O’Conner, in her study of the United States, called “poverty knowledge” (Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Princeton University Press, 2001): that is, the ways in which material deprivation and inequality have been represented and understood, both informing and informed by “scientific research.”

This history pays some attention to the second half of the nineteenth century but really opens in the early twentieth century with the beginning of empirical poverty measurement. The core of the book is the discussion of assessment or measurement of “poverty” across the twentieth century. Davie discusses the work of, primarily, W. M. Macmillan, E. G. Malherbe and the Carnegie Commission, the psychologist I. D. MacCrone (on racial attitudes), Edward Batson (who devised a Poverty Datum Line in Cape Town in the early 1940s), the National Building Research Institute in the early 1950s, the Tomlinson Commission, the NUSAS-based Wages Commissions in the 1970s, successive initiatives led by Francis Wilson at the University of Cape Town in the 1980s and early 1990s, attitudinal survey research by Lawrence Schlemmer, and the post-1993 explosion of poverty survey research. The cast of researchers is almost entirely white and male, with brief walk-on parts for Sol Plaatjie, the poor themselves (through studies documenting the “voices” of the poor in the late 1990s), and members of African National Congress (ANC) governments after 1994. The book concludes with an epilogue that discusses the 2012 National Development Plan.

Davie locates this history of poverty measurement in the broader context of general representations and understandings of poverty. Research informed how policymakers understood poverty, but the scientists themselves were shaped by prevailing norms and discourses. Davie emphasizes the “co-production” of knowledge by professional and lay experts. Poverty knowledge, she writes, is a tumultuous “historical dialectic” (15). Her analysis is informed by, especially, Foucault and Latour.

This is a provocative and stimulating but also frustrating book. Much of the analysis of poverty research is rich and revealing. The chapters on Batson and the Wages Commissions stand out. What emerges is another dimension of the self-conscious modernism of both South African researchers and the South African state through almost the entire twentieth century. This history of poverty research is, however, patchy, perhaps inevitably: Davie does not get to grips with the official production of statistics relating to poverty by government commissions, the Census Office, or the Wage Board (which set minimum wages and therefore monitored the cost of living). She notes that the state had a deep interest in poverty among white South Africans and, intermittently, among black as well as white industrial workers, but she skirts the production of knowledge about these groups. She also pays little attention to the work of female researchers such as the Carnegie Commissioner M. E. R. Rothmann, Ellen Hellman (discussed in Andrew Bank’s recent Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists [Cambridge University Press, 2016]), and Mamphela Ramphele (who was a community activist and researcher in her own right prior to collaborating with Francis Wilson in the 1980s).

Davie’s ambition is to show how research is informed by, and informs, predominant social norms and understandings of poverty. In her discussion of the social construction of poverty data in the early and mid-twentieth century, Davie shows how researchers struggled to escape the hierarchical norms associated with white supremacy. Even Macmillan, she says, “dabbled in degeneration discourse” (100) in his earlier work. To my mind, Davie might have taken this analysis further. She points to some of the ways in which poverty measurement was informed by racially differentiated notions of need, but underestimates how pervasive this was, and how the legacy of this persists in postapartheid South Africa. Her illuminating discussion of Batson overlooks the way in which he got around the difficulty of specifying a general poverty line in Cape Town in 1940–42, given the enormous difference in the minimum housing costs considered appropriate for white, Coloured, and African people. Batson’s “poverty line” was calculated exclusive of housing (and transport) costs, and in practice it was much higher for white than for African people, reflecting the racist norm that a poor white person should not live in the lowest-cost neighborhoods. Today, more than seventy years later, predominant specifications of the poverty line (and of the appropriate level of the old-age pension, wages, etc.) reflect this history in that norms of what constitutes poverty have been shaped by prior norms about what constituted poverty among white South Africans. “Absolute” poverty lines in South Africa (even more than elsewhere) have always entailed a “relative” component. South African researchers and policymakers thus tend toward setting higher poverty lines than is usual in countries with similar levels of GDP per capita but without South Africa’s racialized, colonial history.

Davie is less convincing in showing how “scientific” research informed how elites understood poverty. She points to Verwoerd’s rejection of the main recommendations of the Tomlinson Commission in the 1950s, and some of the ways in which ANC politicians in the 2000s chipped away at the legitimacy of research that suggested that poverty had persisted or even risen under ANC-led governments. She shows how, in the early twentieth century, white elites tended to view African people as primitive rather than poor. But her neglect of the state limits her analysis of “poverty knowledge” through most of the century. Writing about the 1990s and 2000s, Davie lapses into a well-worn critique of supposed “neoliberalism” with almost no dissection of what kind of poverty knowledge underlay these policy preferences. There is almost no discussion of how understandings of poverty informed (and continue to inform) the design of old-age pensions and other social assistance programs.

Sadly, the text is also marred by errors and typos. Margaret Ballinger was not a member of the Native Representative Council (145), but was an MP, one of the “native representatives” in Parliament until they were excluded in 1960–61. E. G. Jansen was not the United Party Secretary for Native Affairs (160–61), but was the National Party Minister of Native Affairs in 1948–50. Tomlinson was, at the time of his appointment, a professor at Stellenbosch, not Pretoria (161). Bargaining Councils were not the former Wage Boards (292). Numerous names are misspelled (Janisch, Rheinnalt Jones, “Jabob” Dlamini, Ingrid “Woolgard,” Neil “Colman”). My own 2005 book is miscited. Some items in the index are not listed in alphabetical order (and a number of individuals named in the text are not included in the index at all).