Available again in a single volume, New Babylon, New Nineveh explores the past struggles of everyday people on the Witwatersrand, South Africa, 1886-1914. This was a period of extraordinary social, political and economic change. Charles van Onselen examines a host of practices, processes and problems which, in many ways, make for startling comparisons with modern-day South Africa. Van Onselen investigates the pervasive, but highly problematic use of alcohol and prostitution, which were used to control both black and white mine workers, by the state and the mine owners. This exploitation of the lifestyle of the single miners later gave way to the official encouragement of working-class family life. This gave rise to the advent of domestic servants and the introduction of a systematic programme of suburbanisation and cheap public transportation. We see how not even these developments were able to protect the poorest and weakest South Africans of the time. Van Onselen explains how Afrikaner unemployment and an affinity for trade unionism were paralleled by further marginalisation, black unemployment and the resultant formation of prison gangs, which flourish even to the present day.

Where was the Hanging Garden of Babylon and what did it look like ? Why did the ancient Greeks and Romans consider it to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World? Renowned Babylonian expert Stephanie Dalley delves into the legends filled with myth and mystery to piece together the enigmatic history of this elusive world wonder.

The rediscovery of Babylon and Assyria in the 1840s transformed Western views on the origins of civilisation. The excavation of Nineveh proved that even the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians together did not constitute the ancient world. These peoples had nothing to do with the beginnings of civilisation on Earth. It was in Mesopotamia that humanity took the first steps on its path towards the society we know today. The Sumerians inaugurated civilisation itself, but it was the Babylonians and then the Assyrians who fulfilled its potential. Their early experiments in state formation remain fascinating to us today: just like our governments, for a thousand years Babylon and Assyria grappled with the challenges of organising central power, administering distant territories, and engineering social harmony in empires and their cities. These achievements form one of the momentous episodes in human history; the Mesopotamian invention of writing revolutionised our minds and increased our intellectual possibilities a hundredfold. The First Great Powers is a revelation: of kingship, warfare, society and religion. Here at last we can discover what it meant to be an ancient Mesopotamian living in such an extraordinary world.

Until now there has been no single text that brings together the material that reveals the unfolding geography of Johannesburg, South Africa. This books describes the history of the city from its days as a mining camp to its position of premier metropolis in Africa. The present geography of Johannesburg, and the problems and dysfunctions that is hat exhibited at various stages in its history since 1886, cannot be understood without a firm grasp of what has evolved of the past 120 years.