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 defined for too long 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.