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In January 2008 the Ghanaian Central Bank announced that it had introduced a new centralized mechanism for the settlement of transactions between the Ghanaian banks. This interbank switch, as it was called, was purchased from, and managed by, the South African company Net 1 UEPS, and it had a unique central organizing principle. The switch was indexed biometrically, using a key derived from the ten fingerprints of account holders. This new interbank switch and a smartcard encoded in the same way has equipped Ghana with the world's first biometric money supply. This article is an effort to explain the development and significance of this biometric money, which Ghanaians call the e-Zwich. It traces the way in which biometric registration in Ghana (as in other African countries) has leaked from the mundane, difficult, and mostly unrewarding, task of civil registration into the more properly remunerated domain of monetary transactions. Viewed in the light of the rich historical anthropology of money in West Africa, what is at stake in Ghana may be much more significant than any of the current participants fully realize. Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study is that the e-Zwich system might actually succeed.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the key arguments and subjects discussed in the book, but it undertakes this review by means of a close investigation of the place of registration in contemporary scholarship. It explores the meaning of the term registration, and then examines the concept in existing social science theory, tracking the limits of its usage in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jack Goody, James Scott, and Amartya Sen's scholarship of social rights. It draws linkages between the chapters in the volume and the existing historiography on documentary government, drawing out the implications, in particular, of Clanchy's work. Moving beyond this review, it offers a theoretical account of the work of registration which highlights the (often neglected) dialectical politics at work in the registration of membership in human collectivities across time and region.

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Biometric identification and registration systems are being proposed by governments and businesses across the world. Surprisingly they are under most rapid, and systematic, development in countries in Africa and Asia. In this groundbreaking book Keith Breckenridge traces how the origins of the systems being developed in places like India, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana can be found in a century-long history of biometric government in South Africa, with the South African experience of centralized fingerprint identification unparalleled in its chronological depth and demographic scope. He shows how empire, and particularly the triangular relationship between India, the Witwatersrand and Britain, established the special South African obsession with biometric government, and shaped the international politics that developed around it for the length of the twentieth century. He also examines the political effects of biometric registration systems, revealing their consequences for the basic workings of the institutions of democracy and authoritarianism.