Meet the researcher: Maria Dyveke Styve

Research focus

My project looks at the historical and current connections between the finance sector in London and the mining industry in South Africa. I'm trying to understand some of the continuities and discontinuities of economic, social and political structures that were influenced by the way that the mining industry was set up in the 1870s, and how radical demands for redistribution today have to be understood within a long-term historical context.

I’m also really interested in some of the egalitarian paradoxes that emerge out of the Enlightenment period. European modernity was saturated with racialized understandings of notions of being, freedom and equality. This forms an important basis for understanding the expansion the British empire, and the reverberations that still echo in today’s post-1994 South Africa.