Pirate enlightenment, or the real Libertalia

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. (Jan.)

This posthumously published book by activist-anthropologist Graeber (The Dawn of Everything; Debt: The First 5,000 Years) questions whether Enlightenment ideals might have developed outside of Europe. A well-known anarchist, Graeber studied the ethnography of Madagascar and presents his findings to discuss social hierarchies, pirates, and alternative enlightenments outside of France during the period. Aside from swashbuckling sea battles, pirate culture was highly egalitarian for its day. Graeber's studies of the Malagasy natives and the Zana-Malata people of Madagascar, the descendants of the pirates who made Madagascar their home base, are an insightful, if controversial, addition to anthropological scholarship. Narrator Roger Davis, who earned first-class honors in media and anthropology, puts his training to good use to lead listeners through 17th- and 18th-century Malagasy history. Davis pieces together contemporary accounts of pirate settlements, and his clear delivery helps listeners sort out the names and narratives of this romp through history. VERDICT Graeber's intriguing final work will have listeners wondering if the pirates of Madagascar established something revolutionary. Did their society experiment with ideas that would later be discussed in European salons? An excellent and thought-provoking addition to large public library and academic collections, but possibly too scholarly for smaller public libraries.--Laura Trombley

The final book from the longtime activist anthropologist. In a lively display of up-to-date anthropology, Graeber (1961-2020) offers a behind-the-scenes view of how a skilled researcher extracts knowledge from the slimmest evidence about a long-ago multiethnic society composed of pirates and settled members of existing communities. In this posthumous book, the author turns to 17th- and 18th-century Madagascar and examines hard-to-credit sources to tease out some plausible facts about the creation and early life of a distinctive Indian Ocean society, some of whose Malagasy descendants ("the Zana-Malata") are alive today. Exhibiting his characteristic politically tinged sympathies, Graeber describes the pirates who plied the seas and settled on Madagascar as an ethno-racially integrated proletariat "spearheading the development of new forms of democratic governance." He also argues that many of the pirates and others displayed European Enlightenment ideas even though they inhabited "a very unlikely home for Enlightenment political experiments." Malagasies were "Madagascar's most stubbornly egalitarian peoples," and, as the author shows, women played significant roles in the society, which reflected Jewish, Muslin, Ismaili, and Gnostic origins as well as native Malagasy and Christian ones. All of this information gives Graeber the chance to wonder, in his most provocative conjecture, whether Enlightenment ideals might have emerged as much beyond Western lands as within them. His argument that pirates, women traders, and community leaders in early 18th-century Madagascar were "global political actors in the fullest sense of the term" is overstated, but even with such excesses taken into account, the text is a tour de force of anthropological scholarship and an important addition to Malagasy history. It's also a work written with a pleasingly light touch. The principal audience will be anthropologists, but those who love pirate lore or who seek evidence that mixed populations were long capable of establishing proto-democratic societies will also find enlightenment in these pages. Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.