Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

August 1, 2022

Famed activist/thinker Graeber, associated with Occupy Wall Street and the author of the New York Times best-selling The Dawn of Everything and Debt, died in September 2020. This final work is an outgrowth of graduate research he did in Madagascar on the Zana-Malata, descendants of pirates who settled on the island in the 1700s. What results is a study of pirate societies as self-governing alternatives to European empire. With a 200,000-copy first printing.

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September 26, 2022
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.

November 1, 2022
The final book from the longtime activist anthropologist. In a lively display of up-to-date anthropology, Graeber (1961-2020) offers a behind-the-scenes view of how a skilled researcher extracts knowledge from the slimmest evidence about a long-ago multiethnic society composed of pirates and settled members of existing communities. In this posthumous book, the author turns to 17th- and 18th-century Madagascar and examines hard-to-credit sources to tease out some plausible facts about the creation and early life of a distinctive Indian Ocean society, some of whose Malagasy descendants ("the Zana-Malata") are alive today. Exhibiting his characteristic politically tinged sympathies, Graeber describes the pirates who plied the seas and settled on Madagascar as an ethno-racially integrated proletariat "spearheading the development of new forms of democratic governance." He also argues that many of the pirates and others displayed European Enlightenment ideas even though they inhabited "a very unlikely home for Enlightenment political experiments." Malagasies were "Madagascar's most stubbornly egalitarian peoples," and, as the author shows, women played significant roles in the society, which reflected Jewish, Muslin, Ismaili, and Gnostic origins as well as native Malagasy and Christian ones. All of this information gives Graeber the chance to wonder, in his most provocative conjecture, whether Enlightenment ideals might have emerged as much beyond Western lands as within them. His argument that pirates, women traders, and community leaders in early 18th-century Madagascar were "global political actors in the fullest sense of the term" is overstated, but even with such excesses taken into account, the text is a tour de force of anthropological scholarship and an important addition to Malagasy history. It's also a work written with a pleasingly light touch. The principal audience will be anthropologists, but those who love pirate lore or who seek evidence that mixed populations were long capable of establishing proto-democratic societies will also find enlightenment in these pages. Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that.

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December 1, 2022

While conducting field research in Madagascar, Graeber (The Dawn of Everything) learned that Caribbean pirates settled on the island in the early 18th century and that their descendants were Zana-Malata people. Intrigued, he began to collect information about pirate societies in Madagascar, which eventually led to this thought-provoking work. Graeber acknowledges that the sources are scarce and often sensationalistic, but some general facts are accepted. For example, despite their fearsome reputation, pirates were egalitarian aboard their ships: crew members elected their captains, and they settled their problems via conversation, deliberation, and debate. Moreover, Caribbean pirates were drawn to the great riches of the Indian Ocean, and Madagascar made an excellent base from which to conduct raids. Pirates were influenced by the locals in Madagascar, particularly the women, known for their mercantile success and conversational skills. Many married pirates, and they formed communities that combined pirate governance and the egalitarian aspects of Malagasy society. Graeber speculates that these pirate communities influenced the Enlightenment and notes that European intellectuals found inspiration from the proto-Enlightenment ideas of these pirate communities. VERDICT This work will appeal to those interested in pirates or unorthodox views of the Enlightenment.--Dave Pugl

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.