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“Even if we still can’t say we thoroughly understand this period of Madagascar’s history, we did enjoy watching Graeber think about and through it.

Pirate Enlightenment is all we have of Graeber’s work on pirates, a topic that bookends his career. He first picked up the interest when he met descendants of pirates in Madagascar during his PhD fieldwork, and it again occupied him at the time of his death. But readers would certainly get more out of Pirate Enlightenment if they had a sense of the greater trajectory of Graeber’s work. A treasure map, of sorts.”