Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, Vol. 1: New Babylon

In this book Charles van Onselen sets out to portray some of the human consequences of the profound economic and political changes that transformed South Africa in the period between the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand and the outbreak of the First World War. Unlike many of the writers who have looked at this period, his primary concern is not with those who benefitted most from these changes, but with other groups of people, black and white, whose lives and experiences have hitherto been neglected, or at best misunderstood.\nStudies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand consists of two volumes of thematically linked essays. In the first of these, New Babylon, van Onselen writes about the liquor sellers, the prostitutes and cab-drivers, and introduces the volumes with an essay that sets the experiences of all these groups within the wider political and economic context which shaped the course of their lives. In volume 2, New Nineveh, he is concerned with the domestic servants who serviced the needs of the white middle class; the Afrikaner workers struggling to maintain their livelihoods in a hostile environment; and the men who made up the ‘Regiment of the Hills’, the Witwatersrand’s black lumpenproletarian army.\nVan Onselen’s book tells the story of how the ruling classes gradually came to assert their control over the subordinate classes on the Witwatersrand and to exercise a powerful influence over where they lived, how they spent their non-working hours, how domestic labour was allocated, and how they were to endure periods of unemployment. Sensitive to the wider structures of society as much as to the often harsh reality of daily life for the underprivileged and dispossessed, these two volumes at the same time chronicle – with imagination and insight – the struggles of groups of people seeking to find a place of dignity and security within a capitalist world over which they had little control.