Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.
Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.
In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island’s politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber’s final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project, which for too long has been defined as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be “Western” thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pirates and their familiars created a "proto-Enlightenment political experiment" beginning in late 17th-century Madagascar, according to this scattershot history. Anthropologist Graeber (coauthor, The Dawn of Everything), who died in 2020, ponders European pirate settlements on the Madagascar coast in the decades after 1690 and their incubation of democratic, progressive values (apart from their marauding and slave trading): pirates elected their captains and distributed loot equally; their Malagasy wives became empowered businesswomen; and the pirate ethos influenced the Betsimisaraka Confederation, an egalitarian Malagasy political group founded by a pirate's son, which embodied " of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought." As always, Graeber advances grand, leftish themes in catchy prose—"The toothless or peg-legged buccaneer hoisting a flag of defiance against the world, drinking and feasting to a stupor on stolen loot, is... as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire or Adam Smith"—but with more hand-waving than hard evidence. ("While ‘Ranter Bay' seems to just be an Anglicization of the Malagasy Rantabe (‘big beach')," he writes of one pirate lair, "it also seems hard to imagine it's not a reference to the Ranters, a radical working-class antinomian movement that two generations before had openly preached the abolition of private property and existing sexual morality.") The result is a colorful yet unconvincing treatise.
