David Graeber’s final posthumous work, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, explores the rich history of pirate societies and their influence on the Enlightenment. Rooted in David’s field research in Madagascar, the book examines how the Zana-Malata, descendants of pirates, practiced protodemocratic governance. Challenging the European-centric view of Enlightenment thought, David reveals non-European contributions to “Western” ideas and highlights alternative social orders that offer new possibilities for the future.
Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia
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.
Book Review: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Flaschenpost
David Graeber Argues that the Enlightenment Was Heavily Influenced by Pirates
Observer
The late anthropologist maintains that the pirate culture of Madagascar was a major influence on thinkers like Hobbes and Locke.
Did pirates advance democracy? David Graeber’s last book makes the case
Los Angeles Times
David Graeber’s posthumous book, “Pirate Enlightenment,” is a reminder of the joys of reading the popular anthropologist.
Egalitarian Paradise Lost: David Graeber and the Pirates of Madagascar
Сounterpunch
How Enlightened Were the Pirates of Madagascar?
The New York Times
In his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.
Noam Chomsky on David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment
ArtReview
Nika Dubrovsky speaks to Noam Chomsky about pirate societies, ‘bewildered herds’ and the fragility of the present in the context of the late anthropologist David Graeber’s final book
Pirates and politics
Science
An anthropologist argues that experimental communities in Madagascar influenced the European Enlightenment
The Pirate Philosopher: a Review of David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism
"In the last of his publications, Graeber writes in Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia about the role of pirates in developing some of the core tenets of the Enlightenment. He pulls from the ethnographic field research that he conducted for his doctoral thesis in Madgascar, beginning what he thought would be an extended essay that turned in the process into a short book. He wields a host of different accounts of the time period, contending with their contradictions and mythological slants to create a tentative narrative about the Golden Age of Piracy."
David Graeber’s “Pirate Enlightenment”
The true, swashbuckling lives of matriarchs, anarchists, and pirates at the crossroads of the world.
Review of Pirate Enlightenment, by David Graeber
Anarchist Federation
Pirates + Madagascar = Egalitarian Utopia? On David Graeber’s “Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia”
LA Review of Books
"Before he became a swashbuckling public intellectual, his work focused on Madagascar, where he did doctoral research on the legacy of slavery in a highlands village. In his posthumous new book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, he returns to the subject of Madagascar to tell a story that challenges Eurocentric ideas about the origins of the Enlightenment."
Shiver me timbers: Did pirates really usher in the Age of Enlightenment?
The Sydney Morning Herald
"Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia has been published posthumously. Graeber writes he had the choice between presenting this work as a long essay or a short book and chose the latter. At times, therefore, he appears to be stretching his material. That is not to detract from the leap of the imagination he asks us to take with him. Graeber surfs an idea, enjoying its energy without worrying where or how it might make landfall."
Book review: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Radio New Zealand
Review: Pirate Enlightenment, Or The Real Libertalia by David Graeber
Camden New Journal
"In his last book, David Graeber argued that pirates were far more enlightened than we might think".
Book Review: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
Functionally Imperative
Skull & Bones Society: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia By David Graeber
Literary Review
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber reviewed
Washington Post
"Along similar lines, in Pirate Enlightenment, a concise and elegant tract published after his untimely death, Graeber, a self-described anarchist, makes the case that long before European scholars first advanced their vision of liberal democracy, 17th-century Indian Ocean pirates and the Madagascar settlements they influenced produced relatively free and egalitarian civil societies, espousing “a profoundly proletarian version of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral."
