In 2020 the world became a little less interesting when iconoclastic anthropologist, social theorist, and activist David Graeber died at the age of 59. Graeber had a knack for unique insights and provocative questions on a range of subjects, from work (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory), to bureaucracy (The Utopia of Rules), to economics (Debt: The First 5,000 Years). In addition, he wrote thoughtfully on contemporary politics, anarchism, direct action, and history. He was also active in Occupy Wall Street and experiments in direct democracy around the world.
In 2021 we were treated to the release of The Dawn of Everything, his magnum opus, coauthored with archaeologist David Wengrow, which covers just about every topic of interest through a worldwide tour of human history and social theory.
Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, released last month, is the latest (but probably not the last) work of his to be published posthumously. Here, Graeber looks at pirate communities and experiments in living on the Madagascar coast in the 17th and 18th centuries. He considers pirate tales, both real and imagined, and the role these real experiments and made up stories have played in the world.
In the preface Graeber rightly notes that too often black and white history are discussed as if they occurred in entirely separate domains. He argues instead that future historians will see history, particularly the enlightenment, as a period of intellectual ferment and hybridization across much of the world, not just Europe. One value of Graeber’s work, both here and elsewhere, is that global anthropology and world history demonstrates that deliberative councils, democratic decision-making, and egalitarian arrangements are not unique products of European history. Of course how these ideas and practices are characterized by their practitioners can vary radically across societies. Democratic practices among American colonists and Native tribes influenced one another but this doesn’t mean they used the same terms or understood their practices in the same way. To claim so would be inaccurate. But Graeber does highlight the constant interaction between European and non-European ideas and actions.
Turning back to pirates, Graeber argues that some type of pirate settlement, which he calls libertalia, really did exist on the Madagascar coast, it was egalitarian, and its impacts endure to this day. These settlements “were in many ways self-conscious experiments in radical democracy,” (p. xxi). Graeber describes the Betsimisaraka people on the Madagascar coast as living in “a situation where a group of human beings, meeting in public assemblies, comes up with a way to fend off slave traders while still maintaining a decentralized and participatory system of self-governance.” He later calls it “a great historical achievement.” (p. 91). Much of the book concerns their interactions and imbrications with pirates, seafaring culture, and European ideas.
Near the end of the book Graeber summarizes his argument and is worth quoting at length: “I began by arguing that the world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was marked by a much broader intellectual ferment than we usually imagine. What we call “Enlightenment thought” might have come to its full flowering in cities like Paris, Edinburgh, Konigsberg, and Philadelphia, but it was the creation of conversations, arguments, and social experiments that criss-crossed the world. The maritime worlds of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans played a peculiar role in all this, since it was aboard ships, and in port towns, that the liveliest conversations must have taken place. Of course 99 percent of this has been permanently lost to us,” (p. 141).
Pirate Enlightenment is full of interesting history and commentary, and functions as a sort of addendum to his and Wengrow’s masterful The Dawn of Everything. It’s a good, quick read, if ultimately on a smaller scale than some of his most noteworthy contributions.