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 “[one] 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.)