A powerful, eye-opening account of how social welfare, distributed in the form of cash transfers, shapes inequality in contemporary South Africa.

In a narrative style, following individual stories, Erin Torkelson challenges the widely held belief that simply giving money to the poor can solve poverty. Cash transfers are often presented as a straightforward, humane solution embraced across the political spectrum, from global development agencies to progressive academics, to alleviate poverty. But this deeply researched and compelling book reveals a far more complicated and troubling reality.

Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa — from grant payment queues and grocery stores to Parliament and the Constitutional Court — Torkelson shows how a flagship antipoverty programme became entangled with predatory finance. Instead of offering relief, cash transfers are often leveraged bylenders as collateral, pulling recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. The very survival strategies people are pushed into are later framed as personal failings rather than the result of long-standing structural inequality. In the process, individuals are racialised as inadequate managers of money and marked as risky financial subjects.

The book also traces how civil society campaigns forced the state in 2018 to reclaim control of the payment system from private companies. Yet even this victory revealed new challenges: austerity, weak infrastructure and ongoing financial pressures continued to expose recipients to hardship in new forms.

Blending sharp analysis with vivid storytelling, Predatory Welfare offers a bold rethinking of welfare, development and racial inequality. It argues that social grants cannot be understood as neutral or purely benevolent and that economic justice requires far more than cash alone. A timely and urgent intervention, Predatory Welfare asks readers to reconsider what real economic justice looks like — and what it will take to achieve it.

Hundreds of books have been written about The Beatles. Over the last half century, their story has been mythologized and de-mythologized and presented by biographers and journalists as history. Yet many of these works do not strictly qualify as history and the story of how the Beatles' mythology continues to be told has been largely ignored. This book examines the band's historiography, exploring the four major narratives that have developed over time: The semi-whitewashed "Fab Four" account, the acrimonious breakup-era Lennon Remembers version, the biased "Shout!" narrative in the wake of John Lennon's murder, and the current Mark Lewisohn orthodoxy. Drawing on the most influential primary and secondary sources, Beatles history is analyzed using historical methods.