(A list of dramatis personae, a map and some illustrations would have made a huge difference.) The historical narrative is extremely dense, and even with the helpful chronology of events set out in the appendix, the reader will need a large chart to keep track of everything going on. He hopes, rather, to have written a work that establishes “what actually happened on the northeast coast of Madagascar” in those years, one that gives the Malagasy people equal billing in the story.ĭespite its packaging, Pirate Enlightenment is not really the work of popular history or theory that its publishers promise. But Graeber thinks enough has been made of Europeans and their fantasies of noble savages. A good book could be written exploring only this thesis.
As long as our lives are governed by “subtle and insidious” systems of discipline and control, he writes, “we will always fantasize about buccaneers”. The fact that Europeans couldn’t get enough of pirate fantasies may tell us more about Europe than it does about Madagascar. Graeber is conscious of the temptation to romance. What was unprecedented about these settlements, he claims, was their willingness to experiment with egalitarian and democratic forms of social life. Brutal they certainly were, but so were the official armies (and navies) of the day.
Pirate utopia book series#
But he thinks they contain an element of truth in so far as we have reason to suppose that these settlements hosted a series of “self-conscious experiments in radical democracy”. Like other historians, Graeber takes most of Captain Johnson’s breathless piratical tales with a pinch of salt. That quest now appears in a rather different form in this short posthumous work – really a longish essay. His account also came with injunctions to hope: understanding how our systems of social control had arisen might give us a vision of life without them perhaps even help us to dismantle them.
Graeber had outlined the history of debt in relation to other important phenomena: obligation, freedom, punishment and the state. One of his remarks inspired their slogan: “We are the 99%”.
Pirate utopia book full#
During the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, New York’s streets were full of protestors carrying copies of his most popular book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. A self-identified anarchist, albeit of the peaceful kind, Graeber was a kind of younger Noam Chomsky for a new generation of brassed-off youth. It’s a bold claim, but this isn’t the first time that the left-wing theorist and activist (who died in 2020 aged 59) has taken a radically revisionist approach to history. Now, the anthropologist David Graeber proposes that these pirate settlements were also, “in a sense, the first Enlightenment political experiment” the dashing corsair a symbol of freedom, “as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire or Adam Smith”. The pseudonymous Captain Johnson left his mark on European literature through his influence on the creators of two of the best-known fictional pirates: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver and J M Barrie’s Captain Hook. “Libertalia”, he said, was a democratic nation that had abolished both slavery and private property. Its author, supposedly a “Captain Johnson” – possibly a pen-name used by Daniel Defoe – wrote of a faraway utopia in Madagascar. Tales of the pirates reached Europe in such (not wholly reliable) books as the 1724 volume A General History of the Pyrates. Wilson/Bey's idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones developed from his historical review of pirate utopias.The Malagasy coast in the early 18th century was teeming with pirate settlements. Like some other pirate states, it even used to pass treaties from time to time with some European countries, agreeing not to attack their fleets. Wilson focuses on the Pirate Republic of Salé, in 17th century Morocco, which can be considered a type of micronation with its own seaport argot known as "Franco". Wilson writes that these men and women were not only apostates and traitors, as they were considered in their homelands, but their voluntary betrayal of Christendom can also be thought of as a praxis of social resistance. However, thousands of Europeans also converted to Islam, forming the "Renegados" and joining the pirate holy war. The pirates, dubbed " Barbary pirates", ravaged European shipping operations and enslaved many thousands of captives.
Located on the Barbary Coast ( Salé, Algiers and Tunis), those pirate bases were havens for Muslim Corsairs from the 16th to the 18th century.
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