Although a wealthy manufacturer and chairman of Rowntree, a chocolate-making company, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree is best known for his exhaustive, fact-based studies of poverty in his native city of York. His reputation among sociologists comes out of the research he did for his best-known work Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901). Expanding on the empirical studies performed by Charles Booth in London, Rowntree developed a methodology that involved gathering data from an entire population, rather than from select groups. Moreover, he developed specific criteria for defining poverty. Still, his methodology outlasted the categorizing. That is to say, while his use of direct interviews and detailed data collection was the basis for much subsequent British empirical sociology, he himself disavowed the distinctions he had made in his book between "primary" and "secondary" as overly precise and difficult to maintain empirically.

Rowntree was born in York in 1871 and studied chemistry...