Journal of Asian and African Studies 1–3 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021909615616475 jas.sagepub.com J A A S Book review K Breckenridge (2014) Biometric State: The global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 270 pp, ISBN 9781107077843, $110. Reviewed by: Zachary Levenson In Biometric State, Keith Breckenridge provides an intellectual history of biometrics in South Africa since 1850, simultaneously delivering a novel theorization of the postcolonial state. In other words, his empirical object of analysis and major theoretical contribution are one and the same. Biometrics, which he defines as the “identification of people by machines” (12), takes the place of the previously dominant documentary state. This move necessitates a fundamental rethinking of bureaucratic power, moving us beyond the early twentieth century Weberian ideal type, which Breckenridge argues became unreliable due to both capacity issues, and problems posed by forgery and deception. The greatest strength of the book is its engagement with multiple existing literatures, rendering it appealing to political theorists, anthropologists of the state, Africanists, science and technology studies scholars, historians of science, intellectual historians, and political sociologists alike. Breckenridge masterfully dispenses with existing explanations, demonstrating that biometrics was not merely a technological innovation, but the technological innovation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming the existing model of the state itself. Writing against gen- eral explanations ranging from Weber on rationalization to Foucault on governmentality, and from Scott on high modernism to Cooper on the gatekeeper state, he insists that we take “the very spe- cific history of progressivism, and…its distinctively unconstrained role in the making of the South African state after 1900” (26) seriously. He argues that the technologies of government produced under this ascendant progressivism unwittingly generated “the twentieth century enthusiasm for segregation” (208), the dark side of moralizing reforms. Although Africa typically plays the role of “a territory outside of science” in this mode of his- tory writing (27), Breckenridge successfully demonstrates that biometric government was forged in South Africa before being exported to the rest of the postcolonial world. Universal biometrics is a distinctly postcolonial phenomenon, with its Euro-American iteration “designed to target individuals and populations that have been significantly stripped of the rights and statuses of citi- zens” (203), viz. immigrants and criminals. The key figure in this project was Francis Galton, the British progressive—inventor of the statistical tools of inference, correlation and regression; developer of fingerprinting and the subject of the book’s first empirical chapter. In most existing accounts, Galton’s role in bringing eugenics to Africa is overlooked. Breckenridge remedies this by convincingly “show[ing] that Galton’s two biometrics—eugenically motivated statistics of human biology and the technologies of fingerprint identification—have common roots in the project of Empire” (37). 616475JAS 0 0 10.1177/0021909615616475Journal of Asian and African StudiesBook review research-article 2015 at UNIV CALIFORNIA BERKELEY LIB on December 8, 2015 jas.sagepub.com Downloaded from