Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia Reviews

• 
  Nathan Shuherk

  The author called it a long essay and it either should’ve remained as such or used another author(s) to flesh out ideas into something … more. Left a lot to be desired and really dragged throughout. Think some will find it interesting, but ultimately, should not be a priority for anyone not a massive Graeber fan
• 
  David Wineberg

  I don’t know which was less likely: a new book by the late, great David Graeber, or a new book on pirates (of all things) by David Graeber. But there it was and I grabbed it. As usual, I was not disappointed. In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber uses northeast Madagascar as an example of complex societies being influenced by the egalitarian philosophies of 17th century western pirates. This is something only a David Graeber could tackle. Successfully.
  
  
  Pirates were the talk of the whole world in the late 1600s and early 1700s. They were written up, romanticized and made into legends. They stole ships and made them into pirate battleships. They hid their loot all over the world, because it was very difficult to change it into cash. But the most important thing, at least for this book, is that they ran egalitarian societies both onboard and onshore when they tried to settle down. David Graeber spent two years in Madagascar, studying the numerous societies and the island’s history. This is the story of how they influenced each other.
  
  
  It’s a short book (as Graeber books go). It was meant to be an essay in a collection of them, but it was too long. But also too short for a real book, so it languished until now (though it was published in French four years ago). It reveals the intensity Graeber applied to his anthropological side. He was an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics until his death at the age of 59 three years ago. And a big egalitarian.
  
  
  Naturally, history books are not very forthcoming for the kind of detail Graeber insisted on. The most important such book is the biography of a legendary pirate that Graeber challenges from every angle. The grains of truth in it take considerable thought to distill. He concludes: “So the first real ethnographic accounts we have of Madagascar are really notes written by a spy in order to allow a con man to better fabricate accounts of his non-existent exploits.” To which I would add: In a nonexistent country called Libertalia. Good luck drawing conclusions from that. But Graeber could and did.
  
  
  After some rousing text on pirates settling in Madagascar – as many as several thousand did, he says – the book turns its focus to the natives for most of the rest. The Malagasy lived in tribes, extended families really. Every village was independent. They were forever forming alliances and breaking them, going to war and pledging loyalty to each other. But they were also quite egalitarian compared to most other societies, then or now. There were the self-appointed kings, and everyone else. Some had three levels of the highest ranks, but most were simply a king and his people. Kings got removed, and intrigue brought new ones to the fore.
  
  
  The pirates had an enduring effect on them. The natives immediately welcomed them and absorbed them by marriage. Pirates were valued assets because they came on huge ships from exotic foreign lands, were apparently very rich, somewhat educated, and mostly white – all of which made them stand out. And they represented international trade, the most valuable trait of all. Scheming women (women carried out most of the commerce but none of the politics) could and did marry them and made them king. So pirates settled into villages all over the northeast quarter of the island. “Each local group came to have their own local class of stranger-princes, or, as I’ve termed them, ‘internal outsider,’ who were foreigners to their Malagasy neighbors, but Malagasy to foreigners.”
  
  
  The book is even more focused, however. Because just off the east coast of Madagascar is a long slim parallel island called Sainte-Marie, a microcosm of villages, tribes, politics and philosophies. Pirates hid in the coves and ventured onshore to trade. Graeber’s story then uses a framework of one man, Ratsimilaho, who became king at a very young age, proving himself not so much a warrior but as an organizer. He managed to assemble a confederacy called Betsimisaraka that endured for over thirty years. Thirty years of peace and stability, egalitarianism, and even respect. Complaints were handled by ad hoc committees. Punishments were relatively mild and sentences respected throughout the land. It was the same structure pirates employed on their ships, where captains held their rank by approval of the crew, committees managed all aspects of the voyage, loot was split up fairly, and life was not oppressive. The exact opposite of the lives they left behind in England or France or Spain.
  
  
  There are lots of rumors but no certainty over Ratsimilaho’s family, how much of a role pirates played, where and how he was educated and what his influences were. But by the age of twenty, he was king and consolidating a whole confederacy. And unfortunately, his plans to pass it all on to his children failed totally. A worthwhile story in itself.
  
  
  Malagasy wars were fought over trade, or broken promises. Graeber says “While most of the strategy of the war concentrated on maintaining or disrupting supply lines—making it, effectively, continuous with trade—actual combat was classically heroic, full of individual exploits, duels, exchanges of personal challenges and insults, much as one would expect to find in a Homeric, Icelandic, or Maori epic.” Battles would stop while the warriors witnessed an epic match between the greatest from each side. Oaths were made to the effect that once this war is over I will swear loyalty to you, or after this is over our peoples will unite. It was the stuff of myths.
  
  
  Eventually, the pirates simply disappeared, having been absorbed by their new families. Madagascar is no longer a paradise of equality. It has been in a killer drought for years, and the only real equality is that most suffer the same way in a still largely agrarian society where cattle are the most valuable possession, and the most expensive to maintain.
  
  
  As usual with David Graeber, the research is phenomenal. The details are impressive. The analysis is sterling. He manages to gain perspective on a complex island nation that does not have a written history, but innumerable tiny villages and outposts, each representing independent peoples. That they actually appreciated mixed marriages and valued the children produced by them, that they controlled the pirates and drove them off if they abused their privilege, and had heroic cultures based on word of honor - is all very utopian. If anything, this book proves it can be done, even with pirates.
  
  
  David Wineberg
  
  
  (Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber, January 2023)
  
  
  If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written.
  https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
  
  
• 
  Andrew

  This is my first time reading a more focused, less general work of David Graeber in any extended fashion, and when we lost him, we sadly lost one of the best storytellers of our time, someone who was more than happy to step away from the mushmouthed language of so much of the "left" (to the extent that term means anything), and present a straightforward case. To be honest, I don't know much about the subject matter, and as with so many anarchist writings, I question how much Graeber tries to retcon the modern anarchist perspective onto the past, but I was fascinated. It's a subject worth reading more about.
• 
  André

  Sadly for the last time, David Graeber delved into his vast knowledge to make us all question ours. Pirate Enlightenment is, as the author explains, a long essay turned into a short sized (for contemporary standards and especially if you have just read The Dawn of Everything) book. Graeber entices the reader into paying attention with the title, proceeds to explain a part of mid 1000s history of Madagascar, only to then show us how much we don't know about the origins of some of the so called "enlightenment" ideas and politics.
  If you liked questioning common perspectives of humanity's past in The Dawn of Everything, this one is a must read. If you never read anything by Graeber and are no history or anthropology buff, this won't be the easiest start, but it is certainly a valuable read.
  I thank Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.
• 
  Wick Welker

  This wasn’t for me. Too smart and niche. Graeber tries to make a claim about anarchist systems that may or may not have existed in some pirate societies. It’s a very cool concept but I really doubt the claim given the dearth of evidence and the fact that this is coming from a self proclaimed anarchist. There’s just no way this is an objective account. Having said that, I really really like Graeber and encourage everyone to read Bullshit Jobs and Debt. They are mind bending books.
• 
  Read me two times

  Ho iniziato questo libro con una certa idea su come fosse scritto e ho dovuto cambiarla in corso di lettura. Nella parte centrale, l'ho trovato poco incisivo e poco preciso. Spreca pagine e pagine a dirmi sempre la stessa cosa e quello che deve dirmi, ossia cos'è Libertalia e come funzionava, devo capirlo da sola tra le righe del discorso. Mi è piaciuto leggere nel dettaglio la vita e le singole battaglie dei pirati, ma se invece di nominarmi 30000 volte Ratsimilaho in un racconto discoeso, me lo nominavi 20 in una narrazione fluida, forse poi restava lo spazio per puntualizzare la filosofia pirata. Manca il sunto e il punto del discorso, che poi è il titolo del libro. Posso arrivarci da sola, ma perché non me l'ha detto lui?
  La conclusione invece è la cosa più bella, oltre alla prefazione e al primo capitolo. Avrei dato 5 stelle se non fosse stato così approssimativo, ma ne do comunque 3 perché mi ha fatto venir voglia di approfondire il discorso e andare in Madagascar! ^*^
• 
  Ramon Zarate

  Admittedly boring at times, and seemingly unfulfilling in its titular endeavors for much of its runtime, but I absolutely loved it. It wraps up in a satisfying and enlightening way, leaving you wanting to explore more of its subject matter's implications.
• 
  Max Gwynne

  An interesting little ‘non-ella’ on the pirate utopia of Madagascar
• 
  Lisa Wright

  There is a lot to process here. Graeber synthesizes the history of pirates and Madagascar while trying to excise the white, European bias written into that history. Fascinating!
• 
  Miguel

  This felt like a cutting-room-floor chapter of ‘The Dawn of Everything’ that didn't make the grade. Not to take anything away from Graeber’s work here, but had a bit higher amount of hope for this after reading ‘Dawn..’.
• 
  Weiling

  David Graeber stirs the world (again) from his grave. Meant as a provocation to the "Western" origin of the Enlightenment Movement that brought the European Man to the center of the humanity/humanities stage, Graeber dusted the archives of Madagascar’s 17-18th century pirates, mock kings, women traders, and mixed-raced warriors. While the individual portraits of these figures were always already clouded in mystery and myths, the chorus of their intelligent conversations was something that should not have been obscured in human civilization. It was not just contemporaneous with the European Enlightenment philosophers, but more noteworthy is that their stories, fabricated and exaggerated during their circulation, made their way to the European salons and had provoked thoughts. So, could it be that the real laboratory of conversations about egalitarianism was not (just) in those salons and cafes, but the scantly or chaotically recorded pirate ships where democratic election of the captain was common sense, or coastal towns and littoral territories on the island just miles beyond the shore of the African continent?
  
  Seemingly marginal, Madagascar was no small place in the era of pirates and slave trade. Around the turn of the 18th century, it was a crucial node that convened quick and large flows of wealth and peoples between the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. That means the high civilizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas were connected in Madagascar, making the island a de facto creolized zone of cultural and commercial contacts. Themselves the outliers and outlaws cut off from their own social ties, the pirates from Europe and the Caribbeans were absorbed into the Malagasy peoples before long. Their integration into the native tribes had a dual, and often reciprocal, benefits: for the pirates to settle down and legitimize their wealth while using the knowledge of local politics they gained from bonding with the native women to navigate their life on land, and for the ambitious women to negotiate a more advantageous social, economic, and occasionally political stance through the martial status with the rich and respected foreigners.
  
  Standing out of the endless masculine fights and inter-clan killings, which subjected women to political tokens, was the witchcraft/medicine with which native women were said to have used to protect the reciprocity of their relationship with the foreigners stopping by. Whether it was the "love magic" to lure romance, or the curse that induced death—though the bare truth of the sudden deaths of the pirates might be infectious diseases spread across their ships or the towns they went for commerce—their interracial relationships, sexual power, dramatic conversational intelligence, and even posthumous potency placed Malagasy women on a way more liberal (or libertarian) spot than their European counterparts. To what extent Graeber romanticized the folklore of Malagasy femininities is unclear, so is his self-awareness of such romanticization. Yet, he set his goal to disrupt the wholesale exclusion of women's role in the inchoate and never fully matured social experiment of some prototype of egalitarianism in the key location of transoceanic slave and commercial trade.
  
  The oceanic perspective of the proto-Enlightenment confederation on the island of Madagascar—the Betsimisaraka nation—that the descendants of pirates created brings forth the theoretical unsettling of the continent-exceptionalist and Eurocentric view of modern political arrangement. It should not be too unreasonable to imagine a place of such heterogeneity of lifeworlds, height of sexual liberation, rapidity of the flows of goods and wealth, and intensity of multiway conversations to be an active contributor to the burgeoning and formalization of Enlightenment thoughts. Added to this is the strategic roles that Madagascar and pirates played in the fundamentally oceanic logic of European colonialism and capitalism.
  
  Rather than settling in a causal argument, Graeber showed how the Malagasy people mediated the environment that was an integral and formative part of the expanding colonial-capitalist oceanic network that conditioned the birth of the Enlightenment Movement. It was on this ground that he argued for the scholarly recognition of the provisional national establishment on the northeastern coast of Madagascar as "political action." He concluded: “political action is best defined as action that influences others at least some of whom are not present at the time—that is, that influences others by being talked about, narrated, sung, drawn, written, or otherwise represented.” The ways in which the stories of “pirates, women traders, and mpanjaka” circulated around the seas in the late 1600s and early 1700s made Madagascar an intellectually productive periphery without which there would not have had a "center" stage of the human(ities).
  
  The Madagascar study, done in 1989-90 as a dissertation research, marked the beginning of the maturity of Graeber's career. While Pirate Enlightenment came out of the scraps of his unpublished research notes, there is a clear genealogy of Madagascar pirates in his lifelong pursuit of in anarchist anthropology that led to his last major posthumous publication of The Dawn of Everything.
• 
  Richard Thompson

  David Graeber's History of Debt convinced me that social anthropology deserves to continue to exist as an academic discipline and that it can rise above its deep roots in colonialist sneering at indigenous peoples. Then with The Dawn of Everything, I came to respect him even more. This guy was a deep thinker with a strong sense of justice and compassion for others. It's hard to find those qualities combined in a single person. I have not loved his books about anarchism and direct political action so much, but in this, his last book, he goes back to his roots in anthropology, with a historical study of pirate culture in Madagascar and its interaction with the native Malagasy society, which was the product of an interesting mix of influences from India, Arabia and the African continent.
  
  The big takeaway is that Madagascar was a case study for Mr. Graeber's thesis in The Dawn of Everything that human government always operates on a variety of levels, some more top down and some more bottom up. Which one predominates at a given time and place is highly dependent on local conditions. So in Madagascar we have great kings who seem to have no real authority, spontaneous male assemblies that seem democratic, but that might really be vehicles for blunting the power of female merchants, women who go husband hunting among the European pirates, not because they respect their power, beauty or religion but because their booty can be a stake for the the women in a new trading enterprise, and we have pirates who gladly accept this bargain so that they can get someone to fence their stolen goods, plus a wife and local social acceptance into the bargain. The best part of the history is the tale of the wonderfully named Ratsimilaho, a mulatto king who united much of the island and established a dynasty. Or did he? Perhaps he only played one interest group off against another and got himself a big reputation that was never backed up with an equivalent amount of wealth and power. So instead of a great man theory of history, we get an interesting man theory in which an individual can play an important role, but that role is constrained by social forces and may be less than it is made out to be in local legend.
  
  I also enjoyed the feeling I got that Mr. Graeber genuinely loved the Malagasy people. His comments on their world and their culture are always caring and respectful. His focus on their good qualities made the reading easier and gave me an appreciation of how their culture helped to drive their history that I would not have gotten from a drier presentation.
• 
  Devina Heriyanto

  I grew up with pirate stories from the massively popular manga, One Piece, and became radicalized through Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years and The Democracy Project. So when news came that there would be a book posthumously published by Graeber and that it was about pirates, I was hooked.
  
  Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia is an effort to challenge the mainstream notion that our understanding of democracy, freedom, and rights come from Europe. As with Dawn of Everything, the book tries to decenter the enlightenment and argues that novel ideas at that time were actually derived from thinkers and experiments from other parts of the world (aka, not Europe).
  
  Graeber retells the story of Libertalia, a pirate settlement in Madagascar, which self-governance and egalitarian way of living can be found in the people of Zana-Malata -- who are the descendants of the pirates. He argues that the pirates bring their ideas of equality to the land where they marry and live with the locals.
  
  As much as I tried to, I couldn't really enjoy the book. The book compiles several accounts on the history of pirates and Ratsimilaho, a descendant of pirate who unites the people of Betsimisaraka. As a result, the story can become confusing. There's also the problem with lack of supporting facts that makes me, who is already a fervent believer of Graeber's idea, not entirely convinced on the so-called egalitarian and proto-democratic society of Libertalia.
  
  The book is probably a passion project for Graeber. It could benefit from more rigorous editing. Or perhaps, as the case with many other books, it should've been kept as a long essay.
  
• 
  Kemp

  One and a half stars and I’m being quite generous. Graeber notes in the preface that his work was too long for an essay so he made it into a book. That was a signal I missed as it meant the topic likely wasn’t flushed out and now that it was a book it could ramble and wander. Which it does.
  
  I’d also argue either an essay or book can be long but the key is that its well written and informative. Which this book is not.
  
  Having circled Madagascar in my travels (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mauritius) but never making it there I thought this might be interesting. And while I did refresh my geography of the island and learned of the pirate activity there I found the whole delivery rather confusing with far too much supposition in a book purported to be investigative.
  
  What’s good about the book? Its short – which is likely the only reason I finished it. It does inform the reader of the indigenous population of Madagascar and their likely origins. It does expand on the pirate population of the island – one that I was whole unaware of prior to reading this book.
  
  But it comes at the price of way too much supposition, speculation, and unnecessary length. Oh, and the enlightenment of the title is rather elusive as well. I’m not sure who was enlightened or how.
  
• 
  Drew

  David Graeber was a professor of mine roughly a decade ago. He was one of my favorite lecturers as he was such a creative thinker and was great at articulating his ideas. I remember that he was quite infatuated with Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. So I guess that it comes as no surprise to me that he would do his own take on the subject.
  
  In the intro, he mentions that this was originally intended as a chapter in the excellent On Kings book he co-wrote with the legendary Marshal Sahlins, and one can definitely see the thematic continuity with that work, as well as, his previous book The Dawn of Everything and his classic essay There Never Was a West.
  
  This is a relatively short book and I see a lot of people here on Goodreads scoffing at the price point to page count. Graeber never cared if people pirated his books and taught me and other classmates how. I bought mine because I wanted a physical copy to go with my entire collection of his works; however, if the price of this thing is the sticking point...it is about pirates after all.
• 
  Tarian

  Bitte nicht lesen! Wahnsinnig langweilig und in einem unangenehmen Ausmaß spekulativ versucht Graeber in diesem Buch, die Wiege der Aufklärung nach Madagaskar zu verlegen, wo sie durch ein politisches Bündnis unter einem charismatischen Militärführer, der von der Organisation der Piraten inspiriert war, aus der Taufe gehoben worden sein soll. Das wäre wahnsinnig spannend und reizend, wenn Graeber nicht ausschließlich vage Verbindungen mit der Ausdeutung 200 Jahre alter Berichte und der Beschreibung von dezentralen, demokratischen Clanstrukturen, die keinesfalls revolutionär erscheinen, verquicken würde. Es scheint Graeber ein Anliegen gewesen zu sein, seine Thesen mit Biegen und Brechen zu bestätigen, indem er Quellen und eigene Forschungen alle entsprechend deutet. Das Ganze ist in einem furchtbar öden Stil gehalten, der teilweise recht holpernd ins Deutsche übertragen wurde. Den zweiten Stern gibt es nur deswegen, weil es thematisch interessant ist, etwas über die Multikulturalität Madagaskars zu erfahren, die zu den egalitären Clanstrukturen beigetragen hat. Worin dabei allerdings die Demokratie und Aufklärung begründet worden sein soll, bleibt ein Rätsel.
• 
  Hamid

  I should start this by saying that I'm a big fan of Graeber's work.
  
  This is interesting but dense. It is not an easy read. Graeber tried to condense a lot of what will be unfamiliar to most readers (including myself) into a small tome - he starts out by stating that people generally prefer short books to long essays - but is fundamentally an academic work moving from broad sweeps to examination of what historiography exists cataloguing the anthropological record. He makes a compelling case that limiting the idea of "the enlightenment" to Europe ignores how different global experiments have developed.
  
  In the case of pirate-native organic experiments, as Graeber says, the pirates were bringing their own experiences to bear from ship to shore and co-mingling with various Malagasy notions. Which are fascinating conceptually but sometimes turgid in historiographical detail.
  
  This is one to read for fans of Graeber (or those involved in academia) but it is not hugely accessible and I would recommend his antemortem popular works before tackling this.
• 
  Dan Cassino

  I hope I’m not alone in not knowing much about the early modern history of the Madagascar coast, and the various groups, including pirates, who settled there. As a work of popular history, it’s not great: there just aren’t a lot of primary sources to work with, there’s not a clear narrative arc, we don’t know much about the main figures. As a side story in Graeber’s larger historical/political project of demonstrating how societies have come up with alternatives to western forms of economics and government, it’s a nice diversion.
  At points, Graeber seems to be feinting towards a “how pirates created the Enlightenment” story - perhaps a relic of when this was planned as a longer book- but he never fully commits to it, and the connections between the political upheavals (or lack thereof) in Madagascar and European drawing rooms are the most tenuous part of the narrative. But taken as a demonstration of his larger thesis- think of it as the longest footnote in “The Dawn of Everything”- it’s perfectly cromulent, if hardly essential.
• 
  Hallie

  After finishing this, I feel even more keenly that the world has lost an important voice with David Graeber's passing. His way of seeing the world, and humanity's history and potential is one in a million. The fact that this was essentially a novella in terms of length somewhat left me unsatisfied because I could have continued reading Graeber's fascinating analysis with respect to the pirate settlements on the coast of Madagascar. Who isn't a fan of pirates? But this essay peels back the swashbuckling narrative to examine how the native Madagascar people and the pirate settlers interacted, exchanged ideas, and organized themselves politically. The Madagascar "kings" may not have been kings at all, and word of the social experimentation taking place in Madagascar trickled back to Europe as some of the Enlightenment writers were putting pen to paper. This was an interesting read, but for me, it may have been too short. Graeber self-admittedly only scratches the surface here, and he has left the door open for scholars to follow.
  
  Netgalley provided me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Audrey

  Well, unfortunately I must admit that this follows the trend of pirate books disappointing me. It’s not *bad*, and it was an enjoyable and interesting read, but I think it suffers from a lack of concrete historical detail about the political organization of the Betsimisaraka Confederation and about how specific pirates may or may not have interacted with it. I think this definitely works best read after The Dawn of Everything (which is the order I read them in) as a kind of additional case study.
• 
  Nina

  Classic Graber, just more concentrated. Rambling, direction or argument not especially clear, full of very specific details on niche topics, many of the interpretations closer to fantasy than historical fact. Also incredibly fun. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone else could make me excited about the history of 18th century north-eastern Madagascar. Would read anything by this guy. Recommended only if you’ve run out of Graber books to read and/or want to know the real story behind Móric Beňovský, the Slovak king of Madagascar, and his importance for Malagasy etnography.
• 
  Pete

  An interesting history on the history of pirates in Madagascar, largely from the Malagasy point of view. Really appreciated his deep look at how the Malagasy saw the pirates and not just the usual way of seeing it. And I liked the theory that the Malagasy, in their forms of kabary, were early enlightenment thinkers.
  
  With all those positives, only three stars because I felt it got into the weeds and tedious at times.