Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything' Amitav Ghosh
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 - 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.
In this jewel of a book, Graeber 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, 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.
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.