Twentieth-Century South Africa: a developmental history by Bill Freund (review)

South Africa occupies an uneasy space in studies of economic development. It is beyond doubt the most industrialised and developed country in the African continent, at least in the traditional sense of structural transformation. Yet, most of that development occurred in the context of brutally racist regimes, in which the exploitation of the many (black people) was leveraged to advance the development of a modern state and economy in the interest of a few (white people). This history and its complex legacy has much to do with South Africa's status as one of the most unequal countries in the world. What Freund explores is the flipside of this coin, namely that inequality is also an outcome of success in the development of capitalism. The response of many development scholars, as with other regimes where development achievements appear laced with poisonous aspects, has been to look elsewhere for inspiration. Within the literature on the developmental state paradigm, pioneered by Johnson (1982) and taken to its most compelling formulation by Amsden (1989), East Asia has indeed constituted a pre-eminent object of focus, with occasional interest paid to selected countries in Latin America or Western Europe. This is not Bill Freund's choice: drawing on extensive historical research, he has written an original contribution on twentieth century South Africa that is rooted explicitly in the developmental state paradigm. As he puts it, '… if one compares contemporary South Africa to a developmental ideal only to dismiss the outcome as a complete failure, the picture is in danger of being shaped more by moralistic precepts than a full consideration of the situation' (14-15).

This is not to say that there is any attempt at defending the legacy of segregation and apartheid regimes in this book–Freund's objective is altogether different. He explores the ways in which South Africa was inspired by, and emulated, the developmental efforts characteristic of so many twentieth century regimes seeking to catch up with advanced countries. What South Africa shared with regimes as diverse as South Korea and France was a keen sense that development required ensuring that capitalist interests would be subsumed under national interests, rather than dictate them. Development was perceived by these political elites as necessary for the very survival of the nation. There was truth in this belief, as the French realised when reflecting on their defeat in the Blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but for white South Africa, the developmental thrust proved ultimately insufficient.

Yet, it is precisely because it constitutes an imperfect, incomplete and in many ways repulsive regime that white South Africa is so interesting to explore using the lens of the developmental state. Analysing the articulation between public and private interests and the attempts at reining in the latter, however unsuccessful they may appear in hindsight, offers important lessons, both from the point of view of understanding the role of the state in development as well as illuminating South Africa's long-term trajectory. It helps in overcoming the South African tendency to exceptionalism, rooted in ignorance and its corollary, the lazy assumption that South Africa is different ontologically from other countries, in Africa or elsewhere.

Twentieth-Century South Africa therefore represents a bold and important contribution in several respects.

First, Freund's book is a reminder of how important history is to the study of development and how rich inductive approaches, that seek to locate theoretical insights in the careful analysis of past events, can be. Such approaches that made up the bulk of the old development economics were subsequently dismissed by the neoclassical obsession with deductive approaches (read–general laws that would not be tainted by contextual detail) that came to dominate the study of development. In relation to Africa, this modelling obsession crashed against the elusive quest for an African (econometric) dummy supposed to account for the lesser performance of the continent, a quest ridiculed by Jerven (2009), also an economic historian. History, in the sense of very long-term history, has since...