Studies of South Africa's economic history have been few and far between over the last fifty years. The conceptualisation of the South African economy remains grounded in the paramountcy of the ‘minerals-energy complex’, a concept developed by Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee in 1996 to describe the enduring importance of precious metal exports, and gold in particular, to the South African economy.Footnote ¹ Precious metal exports held pride of place in the South African economy, despite the best efforts of successive governments to establish a self-sustaining manufacturing sector. Twentieth Century South Africa: A Developmental History sidesteps the enduring preoccupation of economic historians with the preponderance of mining in the country's economy through its consideration of people, organisations, and their various relationships. The book focuses on the country's state corporations, particularly the steel manufacturer Iscor and the coal-to-oil developer Sasol.

The author mobilises the concept of the developmental state to describe the relationship between the state and public and private corporations that creates the conditions conducive to economic development. In this ideal relationship, while organisationally distinct and autonomous from each other, these entities act in a co-ordinated rather than antagonistic manner. The author argues that this relationship existed in South Africa from the 1940s until the 1970s. It was enacted through a handful of notable scientists, specifically the German-trained scientist Hendrik van der Bijl who, as founder of the various state-owned corporations in the 1920, enjoyed an intimate relationship with Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Van der Bijl died in 1948, when apartheid was in its infancy, and subsequently his prodigal successor, Hendrik van Eck, slowly gained the confidence of President Hendrik Verwoerd. According to Freund, South Africa operated as a developmental state until the 1970s, when various shocks to the system, including international sanctions against South Africa, the oil crisis of 1973, and growing unrest in the townships from 1976 scuppered the project.

The author demonstrates that the developmental state enabled the class mobility of whites, alleviating the problem of white impoverishment that had animated government policy for much of the twentieth century. In this context, the state corporations functioned as conduits of state largesse. As the book demonstrates, employment by the state was the pathway for whites, and Afrikaners in particular, to enter the middle-class until the 1960s. The state corporations adopted an affirmative action policy by prioritising the employment of Afrikaners over English-speakers. Nonetheless, the author qualifies the extent to which state intervention enabled capital transfer to Afrikaners in a country where English speakers had historically occupied the higher echelons of the economy. In practice, large English-owned corporations were more likely to benefit from the opportunities offered by the state-owned corporations. By the 1980s, the apartheid state had lost its enthusiasm for alleviating white poverty and began the process of deregulating state corporations. The developmental state unravelled, but the process of capital transfer had arguably already run its course.

The author usefully reconstructs the history of the state corporations in the first half of the twentieth century, filling an important lacuna in the existing historical scholarship. It describes the relationship between the state corporations and the private corporations, particularly those private corporations owned by the Oppenheimer family, which dominated the mining and manufacturing sectors in South Africa. One chapter in the book can be described as a social history, detailing the local level politics in the Vaal Triangle to the south of Johannesburg, including the town of Vanderbijl Park, named in homage to its creator. Iscor established some of its steel manufacturing plants in the region and its engineers moulded the white towns and black townships and hostels in accordance with their own vision of appropriate residential standards. The town of Sharpeville, which is famous as being the site of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1961, is situated in the Vaal Triangle, thus demonstrating the significance of this region, engineered by the state corporations, to the course of political struggle during the twentieth century.

The book is a timely intervention in South Africa's economic and political history. It details a defining period in the history of the country — one where large amounts of state spending encouraged economic and social development of a particular kind. But the idea that the developmental state was dismantled from the 1970s onwards avoids the use of other terms, such as neoliberalism, to explain the transformation of the period. Another potentially useful comparative context is that of the experience of countries across the African continent. In many African countries, the state-led developmental project had similarly ground to a halt by the 1980s, signalling the onset of austerity measures and political reform imposed by international monetary bodies.