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New Babylon, New Nineveh explores the struggles of everyday people on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914.

This was a period of extraordinary social, political and economic change. Charles van Onselen explores a host of practices and problems that, in many ways, make for startling comparisons with South Africa today. In eight fascinating essays, Van Onselen explores 
mining on the Rand and covers diverse aspects of social development that accompanied industrialisation and urbanisation in the years before the First World War.

Van Onselen investigates alcohol and prostitution, used to control both black and white mine workers by the state and mining companies. He delves into the emergence of powerful East European criminal syndicates, which brought women to work in the 
taverns and brothels. This exploitation of single miners later gave way to the official encouragement of working-class family life, which led to the advent of domestic servants and the introduction of a systematic programme of suburbanisation and cheap public 
transport.

We learn how not even these developments were able to protect the poorest South Africans of the time: Afrikaners and black South Africans. Van Onselen explains how Afrikaner unemployment and an affinity for trade unions were paralleled by further marginalisation, black unemployment and the resultant formation of prison gangs, 
which flourish to this day.