Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
David Graeber
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
David Graeber
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends - but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.
For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonize the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.
Pirate Enlightenment playfully dismantles the central myths of the Enlightenment. In their place comes a story about the magic, sea battles, purloined princesses, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms, fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners and devil worship that lie at the origins of modern freedom.
Review
Nick Curnow
When I’m looking for something to read, I usually start lurking in nonfiction; and more often than not, I find myself wandering through the history section looking for my next book. I’m rarely content with fiction; I have seen enough of the world to know that it will always be more fantastical than fiction, and there’s a certain giddy thrill I get when I stumble across a book on a subject that I never knew I wanted to know about.
Case in point: David Graeber’s latest book, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, an historical and anthropological study of 18th-Century pirate utopias of North-West Madagascar, and their influence on the Malagasy peoples. Now that’s what I’m looking for!
Pirate Enlightenment sits comfortably between Pierre Clastres’ classic of anarchist anthropology Society Against the State, and Marcel Schwob’s majestic, eponymous portrait of medieval poet Francois Villon’s involvement with the proto-mafia Coquillards. Graeber delves deep into a past that is both murky and deliberately confusing.
Drawing on the legends of Libertalia, the pirate utopia, while not as imagined by Europeans, led directly into influencing the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Graeber focuses on the Madagascan perspective: local traditions, customs and narratives and how the introduction of piratical mutineers, with dreams of democracy and easy living, affected the communities on the North-West coast.
In the preface, the author offers us this line: ‘Let us tell, then, a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession that lies at the origins of modern freedom.’ It’s a promise of all of these things, and Graeber delivers in spades.
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